THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF PARENTHOOD AND THE PROCESSES OF BONDING AND UNBINDING BETWEEN FATHER AND SON. THE ROLE OF THE FAMILY MEDIATOR

Abstract

Family is a basic social institution subject to deep and fast changes that affect essential elements of itself until now considered as permanent and untouchable as is the father figure to the point of convergence of the family unity. The conjugal or couple conflicts that ends up in the breaking of relations demand a sort of solutions in which the parental functions and the relations between parents and children, and specially the relations between the male parent and the children, are questioned or at least are subject to re-adaptation processes. What is it that makes a man to be a father? What is it that prevents it? What and how are those two figures, father and son, bonded?; To what dynamics the role of the father is subjected in the processes of divorce and separation?; What kind of repercussions have these questions in the processes of family mediation? The family mediation is a method of conflict resolution that takes place in a complex family stage, that is overcome by the dissolution and the separation of the emotional and affective family bonds, which at the same time are implied with the processes of identification of the affected members of the family. In this stage, the figure of the father and its family functions can be questioned without any previous censure position for that matter, it is rather a risk taking position in which stage it happens, as consequences, the social constructions that exist around the paternity in the social imagery, and in that way taking place an inadequate mediation intervention. We pretend to respond to these questions, briefly presented and inside the perspectives of the family mediator’s functions, in the present article