1. Introduction: Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Work of Mourning
Part I Freud Discovers Oedipus
2. The Road to Thebes: Freud and French Retrospective Medicine
3. The Dawn of the Oedipus Complex: A Tale of Two Letters
Part II The Oedipus Complex After Freud
4. Freud's Oedipal Myth and Lacan’s Critique
5. Deleuze-Guattari and the End of Oedipus
6. The Nuclear Family and Its Discontents: Freud, Jung, and Szondi and the Persistence of the Dynasty
Part III Private and Public Fathers
7. Black Fathers, Oedipal Issues, and Modernity
8. Does a Father Need to be a Man?
9. Blindness and Repair in Institutional Psychoanalysis: A Brief History
10. A Fatherless Nation: Alexander Mitscherlich Analyzes Post-War Germany
Part IV Media Matters
11. The Planetary Father Function
12. What is Called Father? (A Fissure in Familialism)
Liliane Weissberg is Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Science at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Among her recent book publications areNachträglich, grundlegend: Der Kommentar als Denkform in der jüdischen Moderne (edited with Andreas Kilcher, 2018), and Benjamin Veitel Ephraim: Kaufmann, Schriftsteller, Geheimagent (2021). She has published widely on Sigmund Freud’s life and work, and is an honorary member of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia.
To what extent are the concepts of fatherhood and family, as proposed by Sigmund Freud, still valid?
Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Modern Family traces the development of Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex and discusses his ideas in the context of recent psychoanalytic work, new sociological data, and theoretical explorations on gender and diversity. Contributors include representatives from many academic disciplines, as well as practicing psychoanalysts who reflect on their experience with patients. Their exciting essays break new ground in defining who a father is—and what a father may be.