Fathers and the bodily care of their infant daughters

This article adds to information on the internal complexity of gender portraits, as well as a psychoanalytic subjective aspect to the small literature on hands-on infant caretaking by fathers. The clinical material, based on the treatment of three fathers of infant daughters, affirms others' claims that fathers as primary caretakers can do well with their infants. The material provides evidence for countering essentialist biologic gendered notions that birthing females alone can accomplish these tasks; evidence that the infants' needs called forth elements of the men's capacity for symbiotic fantasy as bodily providers; associative links with their own internalized infant caretakers-usually women; and evidence that the storied male playful push toward a child's ability to separate may be connected to the sublimated uses of his sexual arousal in proximity to the child's body. The impact of the primary male caretaker with the female child provides a vivid corporeal template upon which to examine these issues.