Exclusively male domination is more and more seen as a problem; ‘Sexism’ belongs to the vocabulary of abusive language. Nevertheless, patriarchy is very persistent. Why? The argument of this article, taken from Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The mermaid and the minotaur, is: patriarchy is a behind on condition of changing male and female roles. Some implications for PBSP can be derived from this theory.

Father as sanctuary against maternal authority

We have to start with a bit of developmental psychology.

The newborn infant starts life totally dependent on the caretaking environment. The baby needs another birth, ‘the psychological birth of the human infant’ (Mahler a.o.), and this takes a year of intensive care of mothering persons. In the case of not good-enough mothering, emotional development can be severely damaged.

Baby’s first relationship with mothering persons is a symbiotic one. The child lives in an emotional world of omnipotence-fantasies, and is not able to feel its own dependency. Thanks to a process of separation and individuation the child learns to differentiate between self and caretaking others. And this means also: experiencing its own dependency on others, its inability to fulfill its own needs. The small child comes to the ‘depressive position’ (Melanie Klein): it ‘mourns’ over its loss of omnipotence-fantasies, the loss of the fantasized almighty parents, and learns bit by bit to accept a not-perfect, but good-enough mothering parent.

This process includes inevitably the rise of feelings of ambivalence towards the caretaking environment. Experiencing anger towards the parents however is only possible on a base of enough basic trust: trust that parents are able to handle aggression towards the parents, risks to lose their love and care. Exactly on this point the role-division of fathers and mothers, according to Dorothy Dinnerstein, plays an important role.

What is the influence of the up till now current practice of exclusively female childrearing? By this role-division mother, a female person, not only is responsible for caretaking of small children, but she also is the only person who is seen as capable of doing that. Only mothers, women, are able to handle the very little, dependent baby, to give it bodily care, to handle its emotions and to empathize in the child’s needs and feelings. But not only that. Mothers, women, are seen as the caretaking sex in general. According to the “classic” role-division, mother also takes care of father. With respect to caretaking mother, woman, is almighty, omnipotent. Some men address their wives with “mom” themselves. She is “the wife”, “the misses”.

However, for a little, totally dependent child, it is very difficult to experience ambivalence towards such an almighty parent. Mother for the child is “all I have”; he cannot risk to lose her. This risk is greater to the extent that father himself is more dependent on mother’s care, unable to take an independent position towards mother and to have a stand of his own. In that case for the child there is no model for the possibility of disagreement with and rebellion against mother and yet keeping the relationship with her.

So, the practice of exclusively female “mothering” gives mother an almighty position, which makes it for a little child more difficult to reach the “depressive position” and to feel its own dependency. Instead of solving the ambivalence-conflict in the way of a “mourning process” the father and fatherly omnipotence, patriarchy, is used as a surrogate-solution: father as a sanctuary from maternal authority. How can this happen?

In the exclusively motherly care for family the child enters a relationship with the father on a age that the child is already more individuated, more reasonable, more “humane”. In the case of father not partaking in child care he never had a symbiotic relationship with the child. By that father is experienced as a separate person, not invested with the all-penetrating omnipotence mother has for the child. In this difference, father and “father’s world” can become a sanctuary for the child that wants to flee from mother’s ambivalently experienced omnipotence.

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