The Effects of the Absent Father on Daughters

This seminar topic was of considerable interest to me because a number of daughters in my family have endured absent fathers either due to war or abandonment. I’ll explore some biographic issues at the end of this piece. First, more details about the psychology of this abandonment.

The seminar was offered via Zoom by the C.G. Jung Foundation in New York City and taught by Susan Schwartz, Jungian and clinical psychologist. The instructor got right to the point, suggesting that the absent or inadequate father often results in insecurity of self, the splintering and disintegration of personality and the silencing of voice. Dr. Schwartz emphasized early on that there are ways to break out of this sense of betrayal, abandonment, and loss, including the application of personal stories, dreams, fairy tales and poetry.

The instructor pointed out that a conscious awareness and perhaps reminders of the absent father can be most harmful to the daughter, if not properly handled. Jung has written that the father is decisive in the destiny of the individual and overidentification with or ignorance of the absent father can have serious ramifications. The daughter has a “hole in her heart.” In turn, this can play on her unconscious “feeling-toned complexes” and symbols in her dreams. These complexes could result in a range of projections on the part of the daughter, from imagining herself as “Daddy’s little girl” or envisioning a “negative father complex” or the “dead father effect.”

Instructor Schwartz emphasized that the father is supposed to foster emotional life in the daughter. Rather, there is often an emptiness, confusion, and a denial of autonomy. And “part of her remains unconscious.” In turn this state can distance the daughter from other males and sow confusion about attachments generally, creating disturbed relationships. The relationship with the father is crucial for the process of “individuation,” a coming to a fuller understanding of psychological health and healing. The absence can result in a shattering of the psyche and loss of body consciousness and positive self-image. And a negative father can be a form of self-punishment and self-tyranny.

Dr. Schwartz says it’s quite understandable in these circumstances that a daughter would carry the “shadow,” the weight of an absent father that can have an archetypal weight. Her advice is to identify the internal father image and have a conversation with that entity. This is particularly important if a daughter idealizes the father, which is often the case (“I’m less; you are more.”).

Sometimes the language might be direct and harsh: “Daddy, you bastard, I am through.” The instructor suggests that we don’t spend our life giving out blood to an absent father. The objective is to manage without the father. Certainly, therapy can be central to discovery. An absent father can still project negative traits. And a daughter might long for a father who had never existed.

I couldn’t help but think during this seminar of the daughters in my family who has lost fathers in war or by abandonment. My mother had seven children with three men; three daughters and fours sons. Here I’ll focus on my sister Pat who died recently at age ninety-three. She seemed to suffer the most from the death of her father when she was about five. She had vague memories of him moving in and out of rooms. Then he died from wounds suffered in World War I, and she and two siblings were sent to an orphanage. After a few years she was sent home to die from diphtheria. She survived, as she would the Battle of Britain with the rest of the clan. She then married an American GI and moved to the states. Years later he would commit suicide, still in pain from his experiences in the Battle of the Bulge. The last time I spoke to him, shortly before his death, he said, “These women are killing me.” He clearly had problem. with women and the feminine, but that is another discussion.

Over the years I grew very close to Pat, and we had many conversations about her dead father and husband and how she handled the loss and the pain. She was very religious and constantly prayed for the two men. My sister, a gentle soul, seemed to take a kind of distant, archetypal view of the father who gave his life for his country. This did not appear to be a struggle.

Psychologist Schwartz discussed how daughters who lack a father figure can break out of idealization, betrayal and abandonment and find repair and renewal. She mentions the use of dreams, personal stories, fairy tales, poetry and the like. This advice reminded me of the many times I shared dreams with Pat, as well as poetry.

In one of our last conversations she spoke about sailing to America in 1946 on the Queen Mary and praying for the dead sailors who had been lost at sea along the ship’s route. During the war she has worked at the British Admiralty and kept updated the map of Navy losses. Pat was ninety-two when she told me this that had all the solemnity of a prayer.

At about the same time Pat mentioned a dream she had of the Prophet Ezekiel who seemed to be opening up the heavens to admit her late husband, father and others. Shortly after her death I had a dream of my sister’s face that seemed to be wearing a headset of a goddess. Toward the end of her life, I sensed my sister has entered a mythical, ethereal realm.

I treat these and related issue more fully in my novel, “When War Becomes Us,” to be published in the fall of this year.

I’ll close with a poem about my sister: “The Cartography of Her Loving Face.”

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The Cartography of Her Loving Face

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I can almost hear the Ohio River

That has washed away decades of pain

Lap against the room where we sit

Knees almost touching as my sister

Her eyes and face watery with time

And liquid memory that has crossed oceans,

Deserts of loneliness and war remembers

Her father’s final words spoken through

Lungs coated with chlorine gas

Then the letting go with children

Cast to the winds as winter settles in.

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She still hears the air raid sirens

In her dreams and remembers waking among

The rubble and the dead after the German

Planes left the skies of London. Her face

Displays this cartography

With a grace and patience that seems

Ethereal as if something sacred

And almost holy has come

From these precious moments of pain.

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The man survived the Battle of the Bulge

With honor and came to her

Then sailing to America

With bride, medals and wounds.

I hear the Ohio River again

As my sister weeps for those

Who have lived and died

Within the arc of her knowing.

It is as if I fall into her anguish

Which is a vibrant letting go

And the closest thing to prayer

I have witnessed in some time.