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French legislation on the rights and duties of fathers has evolved significantly from the ancien régime until the modern age. To what extent does this evolution denote an intrinsic difficulty in clearly defining the father’s role in the development of the child’s internal world? Bion’s model of the container/contained relationship represented crucial progress in our understanding of the way the child accesses thinking via his/her bodily sensations. However, from the dyadic mother/infant relationship phase, one must admit that the container is not simply maternal and contains paternal elements inherited from the mother’s identification with her own father. In a second phase the parental couple plays the role of container for the child’s psyche, enabling him/her to achieve complete autonomy and adult sexuality. The father then acts as guarantor for the boundaries of the child’s psychic space, which must be distinguishable from the boundaries of the psychic spaces of both the mother and the parental couple.