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The birth of a child strongly influences the way in which we adults perceive life and, therefore, our inner world. This birth, or rather the expectation of it, initiates in the father a complex process, the paternal function. Despite being a common experience, there are many open questions regarding its development and its impact on the new father. We reflect here on paternal function and explore conscious and unconscious fantasies of the man facing new-found fatherhood. We propose that a kind of pre-Oedipal process has already begun during pregnancy. The new being’s mere existence inside the womb generates an exclusionary force that sets the father’s ambivalent feelings in motion. The overwhelming certainty of motherhood and the generation of the mother–fetus bubble develops in parallel with the uncertainty of the father, immersed in inner conflicts regarding what his relationship with the mother–child couple is and will be. He rapidly experiences how the child’s presence makes him an excluded third party, always longing to fully occupy the place he once enjoyed beside the mother. The baby enters a world where father’s strong ambivalence is already in place, facilitating and setting in motion a full development of the Oedipal process. Finally, some considerations are outlined on the potential influence of this complex ambivalence in large group reactions and the need to be remembered that humans have displayed since ancient historical times.
Spanish parliament recently issued a new law offering Spanish nationality to Sephardic Jews who so desired and could demonstrate a basic knowledge of the Spanish language and culture. This law attempted to redress a five-centuries-old injustice and was expected to unleash both criticism and praise. Surprisingly, reactions in the public or the press were minimal or absent. Reasons for this are explored through a qualitative study with focus groups, which showed ideas that can be grouped into four main categories: ignorance, justice, distrust, and fear. It is hypothesized that the predominantly silent response to the new law might be due to the fact that it touches on an extremely sensible issue: the historically fragmented Spanish identity. A position of negation is constructed, to avoid deep anxieties related to the fragile core of a collective identity built from many >others< forced to the refuge of an introspection that protects them from the conviction of not fulfiling the ideal identity status, known by all but reached by none. All those >others< have mixed their bloods with the Old Christians along the centuries, possibly transmitting a profound insecurity about their personal and collective identity that might contribute to understanding current social reactions.