Father complex

Father complex in psychology is a complex—a group of unconscious associations, or strong unconscious impulses—which specifically pertains to the image or archetype of the father. These impulses may be either positive (admiring and seeking out older father figures) or negative (distrusting or fearful).

Sigmund Freud, and psychoanalysis after him, saw the father complex, and in particular ambivalent feelings for the father on the part of the male child, as an aspect of the Oedipus complex. By contrast, Carl Jung took the view that both males and females could have a father complex, which in turn might be either positive or negative.

Use of the term father complex emerged from the fruitful collaboration of Freud and Jung during the first decade of the twentieth century — the time when Freud wrote of neurotics "that, as Jung has expressed it, they fall ill of the same complexes against which we normal people struggle as well".

In 1909, Freud made "The Father Complex and the Solution of the Rat Idea" the centrepiece of his study of the Rat Man; Freud saw a reactivation of childhood struggles against paternal authority as standing at the heart of the Rat Man's latter-day compulsions. In 1911, Freud wrote that "in the case of Schreber we find ourselves once again on the familiar ground of the father-complex"; a year earlier, Freud had argued that the father complex — fear, defiance, and disbelief of the father — formed in male patients the most important resistances to his treatment.

The father complex also stood at the conceptual core of Totem and Taboo (1912-3). Even after the break with Jung, when "complex" became a term to be handled with care among Freudians, the father complex remained important in Freud's theorizing in the twenties; — for example, it appeared prominently in The Future of an Illusion (1927). Others in Freud's circle wrote freely of the complex's ambivalent nature. However, by 1946, and Otto Fenichel's compendious summary of the first psychoanalytic half-century, the father complex tended to be subsumed under the broader scope of the Oedipus complex as a whole.

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