Father Was a Bachelor

The unmarried mother, a perennial subject for the balladeer, is also one of society's concerns. Last week a U.S. psychiatrist was worrying about the unmarried mother's equally prevalent opposite number: the unmarried father.

Dr. Norman Reider, head psychiatrist at San Francisco's Mt. Zion Hospital, having completed a study of bastards' fathers, has concluded that they, too, have a pretty rough row to hoe. All kinds of unsettling decisions suddenly confront the unwed father. Should he admit his paternity? Is he sure, after all, that he is the father? Should he marry the girl? Should he feel proud or ashamed of himself?

One type of man willingly admits that he did it and he feels all set up about it. Such a man, says Dr. Reider, often turns out to be a neurotic who has an unconscious desire to assert his virility. There is also the "Don Juan" type who tries to cover up a feeling of inadequacy with a life of carefree promiscuity. Some men, Dr. Reider believes, are even motivated in their illegitimate parenthood by a desire to get married.

Much more common than the proud boys are those who, on learning of their paternity, are overwhelmed with feelings of guilt and shame which sometimes hang on for years. Such men usually agree to get married, and "accept their fate as a just punishment for the damage they have wrought."

Dr. Reider found that there is a certain critical time when unmarried fathers are most amenable to the idea of marriage: when the sense of guilt is at its height, but the sense of being trapped has not yet set in. When that moment passes, it rapidly becomes more & more difficult to pin a father down.

"In Shock." As if he had not enough troubles of his own, the unwed father has to worry about what the mother thinks of him. If, for example, she has an Electra complex (abnormal crush on her own father), she may just act as if her child's father didn't exist. This is damaging to his pride. At the other extreme, if she is a shrewish sort, her vindictiveness against him may reach "vicious proportions."

The unwed father does not often become neurotic or insane (unless he was that way already), but Dr. Reider knows of two bachelors who were so shocked to learn of their paternity that they had schizophrenic breakdowns. Dr. Reider thinks that the father's nervousness--and the mother's troubles, too, of course--would be diminished if the status of illegitimacy were corrected by uniform law. Under present U.S. law, says he, the male tends to get the notion that the important thing is not to get caught. If he becomes a father, he can rationalize his act by saying that he was hooked by the machinations of a scheming woman. In Sweden, where the state is concerned only with the father's responsibility to contribute to his child's support, unwed fathers are much less jumpy.

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