Left join pa on dal resulting in null

Greetings,

I have the following join, and in this join I am getting all of the  
data except that which joins the pa table to the dao table.  When I  
try to join it using a left join, i get all of the data except this  
table.  When I use a right join, I get nothing at all.  If I make  
this a seperate join to dal (rather than nested as it is) I have no  
connection/path to the dao table because of the way that the postgres  
optimizer works, and I have to use another alias, and I THINK that  
the alias was causing other problems, but I'm not certain at the  
moment.  Can someone lead me to the the best way to tackle this problem?

The query currently looks like this:

SELECT    -- a bunch of columns here    dr.profile_id

FROM    dr,    da,    dal    LEFT JOIN (  doo        LEFT JOIN ( dao            LEFT JOIN pa            ON ( pa.dao_id
=dao.dao_id ))  -- the problem area is  
 
here.                                                                      - 
- There are cases where there are no related doo values set but
            - 
 
- I'm not sure how to write this better        ON ( doo.dao_id = dao.dao_id            OR pa.dal_id = doo.dal_id ))
ON( dal.dal_id = doo.dal_id        OR dal.dal_id = pa.dal_id )
 

WHERE dr.dr_id = doo.dr_id    AND dr.dr_id = '1'    AND da.da_id = dal.da_id

ORDER BY da.name



Thank you in advance

Ilene