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Fatherhood has been described as the [[cause ]] and fulfillment of the [[father]]'s creative, protective, and organizing [[power ]] in his [[child]]. As a [[physical ]] and [[symbolic ]] bond between generations, fatherhood implies the [[authority ]] of the father over the child, expressed through the transmission of the [[name]]. The sons use this aspect of [[paternity ]] in the [[construction ]] of their own [[individual ]] and [[social ]] identities, and in their respect for the law. Father-hood is the basis of all [[thought]].Discovering in his [[self]]-[[analysis]], through his [[dreams]], that fatherhood [[satisfied ]] both his [[desire ]] for immortality, through his [[children]], as well as his [[ambivalence ]] toward his own [[dead ]] father, Sigmund [[Freud ]] fathered [[psychoanalysis ]] when he published <i>The [[Interpretation ]] of Dreams</i>, and established that the desire of [[Oedipus ]] to [[sleep ]] with his [[mother ]] and kill his father is [[universal]].Fatherhood is an organizing [[system ]] indissociable from the Oedipus [[complex]]. It [[links ]] the law to desire and to [[castration]]. It [[structures ]] and restrains [[sexuality]], through the father, who is simultaneously loved, protective, and feared. It condenses conflicts of ambivalence and the castration [[anxiety]]. Fatherhood induces [[repression ]] and prompts [[progress]]: It is an inevitable and indestructible origin and obstacle that unites the scattered ego, while showing how to overcome ambivalence through identification with the father. Its [[dynamic ]] potential is anchored in the father-mother-child [[triangle ]] it structures, not in the person of the father who supports the [[paternal function]]. [[Hans ]] (1909b), in the throes of an [[oedipal ]] crisis at four years of age, introjects the [[cultural ]] treasure linked to fatherhood into the [[mythical ]] power of [[language ]] and [[knowledge]]. He is ignorant of the procreative function: Paternity, as the hidden cause for the production of children, confutes [[childhood ]] trust, obstructs independent thought, and betrays the [[subject]]'s expectation of protection. A child affected by [[nostalgia ]] for the father will displace it onto God.Fatherhood was considered to have had a phylogenetic origin, recapitulated by ontogenesis (1912-13a). Having murdered the violent and jealous [[primal ]] father, the sons discover [[the symbolic ]] paternity of the father in the [[work ]] of [[mourning]], made up of ambivalence, [[guilt]], and idealization. Retrospective obedience and the [[renunciation ]] of the father's omnipotence are at the origin of the social contract and the law. For Freud fatherhood also occupies a central [[place ]] in the subject's [[genital ]] organization through the father complex. Linked to [[death ]] and sexuality, which it transcends, and serving as an atemporal and [[structuring ]] reference point, it channels through its incarnated generating power the diphasic [[sexual ]] [[development ]] of the child-become-adolescent, opening him up to the effects of <i>Nachträglichkeit</i>, [[sublimation]], and the [[wish ]] to become a father in his turn.Identification is the prototype of this operation; first, the [[human ]] subject constitutes itself through "primal" identification with the "father of personal [[prehistory]]" (1923b), an [[incorporation ]] of paternity that includes the mother. Fatherhood then, logically, enables the subject's [[separation ]] from the mother and authorizes relations of generation, dramatized as arising from a primal triangle, with differentiated parental imagos. Secondly, the oedipal crisis ends, with the installation of the impersonal superego.The bond with the father is essential for a daughter (1933a). Involved in an intense [[pregenital ]] relation to her mother, she enters late into the Oedipus complex, turning her outwardly directed [[libido ]] inwards. She displaces her [[love ]] onto her father, from whom she wants a child-[[penis]]. Her major anxiety, that of [[being ]] no longer loved, often keeps her dependent on her bond with the father. As a mother she offers fatherhood to the man who is substituting for her father, if she has transcended her own [[claim ]] to the [[phallus]].The bond of fatherhood is connected for the child with the desire that links the mother to the father. Paternity exerts itself when the child induces a "foreigner" (1939a) who is the father to adoption. For Jacques [[Lacan]], a failure of this metaphorizing [[recognition ]] is [[responsible ]] for the [[foreclosure ]] of the [[Name-of-the-Father]], which leads to [[psychosis]]. Melanie [[Klein ]] prefigured the oedipal complex through the nipple-object guiding the child's access to the [[breast]], a paternity incarnated at the very heart of maternity.Fatherhood can be considered as a development when becoming a father leads to [[psychic ]] restructuring.

# [[Freud, Sigmund]]. (1900a). The [[interpretation of dreams]]. Part I. SE, 4: 1-338]]