Fathering reflects a universal symbolic pattern in the individual and collective, conscious and unconscious. We come into this world needing a father, his recognition and to be lovingly seen by him. We innately require a nurturing and caring father figure while his lack of presence affects a daughter’s mind, body and soul. Yet, Jung wrote only one essay on the father and he had four daughters.
Many daughters are raised on the myth of the daughter/father romance. But is this really true? Why has it been accepted if a father has been so rarely present in his daughter’s life and his vision for her absent? Remaining faithful to the myth of the father rule then has restricting ramifications and she learns to renounce the meaning for her own life. The absence of a father sets a daughter up for anguish and disappointment, often even cancelling her creativity and life force.
The father described here is one who might be present but is experienced as an emotional and/or physical absence. Deadened inside, full of his own failures, loss and depression, he has no room for the life of the daughter. Such absence becomes for her a dead emptiness, an abyss that leaves her without a solid foundation. His lack in viewing her with love creates no end of emotional distance, internal disconnection and the self out of kilter with the rest of the personality. She feels off with others.
In therapy a woman cannot remember experiences of father love or care. Another says her father’s eyes express denigration. He does not listen but makes negative comments about her clothes and lifestyle. Yet another describes disapproval in the look from a father who never understood, saw or got her desires for learning and knowledge. All lacked support, guidance, nurturance, or correct holding with a father.
When a father is absent to himself, he cannot perceive his daughter. The consequences can be damaging to her self-care, ability to turn inward, overwhelmed by grief and loss of self. There is a foreclosure on relatedness fueled by the feelings that being open to another brings the risk of psychological annihilation. This begins with the secret psychic death in childhood when she slowly gives up. Her spirit becomes overpowered when unloved and her wishes ruptured. From the outside everything might look normal, but she was rejected, not only by the father but also now by herself. This woman has lost a true and vital part. The yes feeling or the capacity for growth and roots to the basic system have gone awry.
The daughter/father problem reaches to the intrapsychic depths and archetypal roots–to issues of self and culture wherein lie the complex aspects, the patriarchal biases and father lack many daughters are raised on. Father is an absence, not a presence, a vacant home, a shadow and she unseen and unknown. The chronic absence of him is accompanied by anxiety and depression. These are the incessant scenarios occurring day after day, year after year, dream after dream.
The absent father has no love to display and transfers his sorrows, losses and depression to her. This leaves the daughter with self-alienation, drugged by inertia, living in a trance-like state with no sense of time or worth. Adversely affecting confidence, promoting idealization of others, it feeds an internalized cycle of self-hatred and oppression. The daughter assumes she has the fault, a feeling that strikes to the core. Even so, she might feel the need to save the father, make him happy, and please him.
Addressing these wounds opens the damages, the old patterns and releases the energy for new modes of being. The focus on lack and absence sheds light not only on the symptoms and problems but also on the treatment and hope for both fathers and daughters. This is a place to be filled. Jung wrote at the end of the essay, ‘The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual,’ ‘It is to be hoped that experience in the years to come will sink deeper shafts into this obscure territory, on which I have been able to shed but a fleeting light’ (1961, p. 301).
There is also a 3 class course on The Absent Father Effect on Daughters by Susan Schwartz. You can find that course here.
Susan Schwartz
Susan E. Schwartz, PhD, Jungian analyst and clinical psychologist, is a member of the International Association of Analytical Psychology. She has taught in numerous Jungian programs and presented at conferences, workshops and lectures in the USA and many other countries.
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I know this archetype of the father. Something I realized many years ago was my father didn’t fit this type; it was my mother who you described above. My father was at home when I was young because of an accident, and from 2-5, he watched me. My father was a very calm, loving, patient man who spent our days together listening to The Beatles, making stained glass windows, and intricate furniture and woodwork. He understood nature; we took long drives into the forgotten, small towns of northern Minnesota. He told stories about his dreams, his experience of dying at 12 and coming back because ‘ it wasn’t his time.’ He grew up on a large dairy farm on the border of town that my great grandfather built in1898 after working for six years on his adventure of America. He was a proud Danish man and built the biggest barn west of the Mississippi River; he was a dairy farmer; it was all he’d ever known. The explanation for coming to Minnesota was it had the same weather and seasons as Denmark.
My father grew up on that farm with his two older brothers, one of which I only knew through stories due to his death at age 20.
That farm is run by my cousin today, and it remains The Christensen Farm. It has its enchantment, from the big apple trees my grandmother made pies with to the smell of the freshly turned soil and the sweetness of the cornfields in the late summer. That farm was my magical place, overwhelming with the sensory perception that only nature can provide. The feel of my horse’s mane, my favorite barn cat who I chased for hours but always caught, the lanolin in the sheep’s wooly cover before the shaving.
My mother has to be busy; it’s almost as if she fears any source of relaxation, that even the thought of doing nothing will damn her to some wrong place in her psyche. I’ve tried to recall any parts of childhood with her and me bonding, but none come to light. She worked all the time, and my sister, who is eight years my senior, was her buddy. I lost my father to cancer in February, and it feels like a part of me went with him.
My mother, who I love, has kept herself so busy that I’ve only seen her twice since February. I understand that she and I are from opposite spectrums of the psyche. She is in the material world, unwilling to hear of her manic behavior or her struggle with depression that in her mind doesn’t exist. Her mantra is, “ suck it up.” keep moving, and whatever will be will be. I understand her, which makes it easier to see the big picture of why and how she deals with the game of life.
She was in charge of the family and made small efforts to make my father feel like he had an equal say in things. He was fully aware of this, which is why I believe he understood who I was as a soul. There were times when I know he’d attempt to intervene, but it was left on deaf ears. Some of the traumatic abuse I suffered was kept from him at my mother’s insistence, but he knew. He always knew in so many ways, just like he understood the earth, nature, and the world of the creatures that encompass the planet. I’ve often wondered what my mother and father had in common? People have different personas. They reflect on other people, and possibly he was good at that, I know he was good at it, but never in an unauthentic way.