The Absent Father Effect on Daughters: Father Desire, Father Wounds

The Absent Father Effect on Daughters investigates the impact of absent – physically or emotionally – and inadequate fathers on the lives and psyches of their daughters through the perspective of Jungian analytical psychology. This book tells the stories of daughters who describe the insecurity of self, the splintering and disintegration of the personality, and the silencing of voice.

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The Absent Father Effect on Daughters investigates the impact of absent – physically or emotionally – and inadequate fathers on the lives and psyches of their daughters through the perspective of Jungian analytical psychology. This book tells the stories of daughters who describe the insecurity of self, the splintering and disintegration of the personality, and the silencing of voice.

Issues of fathers and daughters reach to the intra-psychic depths and archetypal roots, to issues of self and culture, both personal and collective. Susan E. Schwartz illustrates the maladies and disappointments of daughters who lack a father figure and incorporates clinical examples describing how daughters can break out of idealizations, betrayals, abandonments and losses to move towards repair and renewal. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach, expanding and elucidating Jungian concepts through dreams, personal stories, fairy tales and the poetry of Sylvia Plath, along with psychoanalytic theory, including Andre Green’s ‘dead father effect’ and Julia Kristeva’s theories on women and the body as abject.

Examining daughters both personally and collectively affected by the lack of a father, The Absent Father Effect on Daughters is highly relevant for those wanting to understand the complex dynamics of daughters and fathers to become their authentic selves. It will be essential reading for anyone seeking understanding, analytical and depth psychologists, other therapy professionals, academics and students with Jungian and post-Jungian interests.

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Paperback, eBook, Hardcover

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SKU 32489125

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Truly something new and original on the daughter-father connection. Schwartz explains how and why daughters remain enmeshed with fathers whom, for whatever reason, have been less than good-enough. There is no demonization; rather, an exquisite compassion shines through. Whilst she writes as a clinician – and a really good one, as her account of working with dreams shows – Schwartz offers something that, by definition really, applies to every woman and the majority of men who will read it.

Andrew Samuels, Author

How do you have an incest fantasy about someone who isn’t there; or if they are, they terrify? How do you mourn the loss of someone you never knew, of a relationship you never had? Drawing on her life’s work as a clinician, the author deftly goes to the heart of trauma in the father-daughter relationship: showing how connecting to the archetypal father and collective experience a healing can begin.

Dale Mathers, Jungian Analyst, UK