Father Hunger

Explorations with Adults and Children

James Herzog

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134897056
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

James M. Herzog's Father Hunger: Explorations with Adults and Children will quickly take its place both as a landmark contribution to developmental psychology and as an enduring classic in the clinical literature of psychoanalysis. We live in an era when a great many children grow up without a father, or, worse still, with fathers who traumatically abuse them. Yet, society continues to ignore the emotional price that children pay, and often continue to pay throughout their lives, for this tragic state of affairs.

Father Hunger will change this situation. First drawn to his topic by observing the recurring nightmares of clinic-referred children of newly separated parents - nightmares in which the children's fear of their own aggression was coupled with desperate wishes for their fathers' return - Herzog went on to spend more than two decades exploring the role of the father in a variety of naturalistic settings. He discovered that the characteristically intense manner in which fathers engaged their children provided an experience of contained excitement that served as a necessary scaffolding to the children's emerging sense of self and as a potential buffer against future trauma.

A brilliant observer and remarkably gifted, caring clinician, Herzog remains true to the ambiguities and multiple leves of meaning that arise in therapeutic encounters with real people. He consistently locates his therapeutic strategies and clinical discoveries within a sophisticated observational framework, thus making his formulations about father hunger and its remediation of immediate value to scientific researchers. A model of humane psychoanalytic exploration in response to a deepening social problem, Father Hunger is a clinical document destined to raise public consciousness and help shape social policy. And in the extraordinary stories of therapeutic struggle and restoration that emerge from its pages, it is a stunning testament to the resiliency of the human spirit.

1	Introduction

INFORMATION OBTAINED IN THE ANALYTIC SETTING is different from that emanating from biography, autobiography, random sampling, structured interviews, philosophical contemplation, or other modes of data collection. It seems to bear a stronger resemblance to actual developmental processes than to scientific pursuits in that absolute truth is less an ultimate goal than is the making of meaning and the finding of sense in what has transpired and in what is occurring and recurring. Continuity as a principle of the ongoing life of the mind pulls for the construction of causal sequences and meaningful patternings. The veridicality of these constructions may be limited to the conceptual framework in which they are devised and divined.

Practitioners from other disciplines have cautioned about the generalizability of data from the analytic situation and stressed the particularities and limitations of insights and conclusions drawn from such a setting. Their caveats are well taken but need not result in the exclusion of analytic data from the palette of information available to theoreticians or students of human development or behavior. Rather the special significance of psychoanalytic data is in what I have called “the domain of personal meaning,” the construction of reality that features both conscious and unconscious process, thought, and fantasy and is to be distinguished from data bases I have called the level of videotaped reality and the level of interrogative reality.

By videotaped reality, I mean data the camera can see and record. Currently, much is being learned by filming mother-infant interaction, father-child interactions, and actual therapeutic encounters. One sees what is happening. Interrogative reality refers to direct questioning of a child, his parents, or any individual. This approach yields consciously considered material thought to be appropriate in response to the query in a particular circumstance. As has been noted by Mary Main (2000; Hesse and Main, 2000) and others (e.g., Slade, 2000), this level of inquiry can also yield data about underlying neuropsychological linguistic strategies of cognition and affect tolerance that are highly correlated with an individual’s attachment history.

In this book, I use primarily psychoanalytic information, with all its robustness and all its fragility. Each individual whose story unfolds in conversation with the analyst illustrates the ways in which the unraveling and reconstruction of the past as it is encountered in the present allows for a coconstructed version of individual development and derailment and for a fresh perspective on what is entailed in restitution and even in repair. I call the intermediate space that analyst and analysand create together the Spielraum, or play space; what is unique to this setting is a collaborative finding of ways in which two people can play, albeit asymmetrically, in a manner that is safe enough and contained enough that the most profound personal pain and conflict is assured admission and respectful regard.

The fresh perspective on the self and its history is unique to the analytic setting and to the opportunity for new play that arises out of a kind of interplay that features not only replay but also an examination of how and why the replay has occurred.

I am always trying to explore the ways in which the self, especially the masculine self, develops as a self-seeking entity using sameness and difference as a way of harnessing, knowing, and owning his own attributes, both facultative and problematic. I try to show that the boy self is concerned with learning how to do it, as well as mastering the concomitant tasks of being, doing, bearing, working on, working with, working out, and working though. How these processes are reencountered, recapitulated, and reinvented in the analytic setting is a continued focus. My emphasis on the masculine self grows out of several decades of research on the role of the father in child development. This focus has multiple determinants, not the least of which is autobiographical.

The self, as it is constructed of accrued experience and subsequent representation of self with father, with mother, and with father and mother together, is, optimally, a self endowed with multiple playmode options and resiliency in the face of overwhelming or underwhelming environmental input. Such a self has a greater capacity to “roll with the punches” and thus a greater capacity both to manage trauma and to integrate its accoutrements. This thesis, which addresses the primacy of triadic experience at every developmental. stage, is a fundamental postulate of my work. On it I base the notion of internal enactments as fundamental to the neurotic process and instrumental in the recovery from the derailments in the play function that trauma may occasion. Such derailment features the emergence of external enactments and of interactive enactment as primary psychological modes of functioning. The ubiquity of these modes is very impressive; their integration into the recovery process is often complex and problematic. By presenting detailed analytic data, I hope to illustrate the ways in which each of these processes appears, influences both analytic and reparative developmental play, and influences the lasting and shiftable contours of the individual inscape as it is seen in an interactive Spielraum. Within this developmental triad, I often highlight the self-with-father representation and its particular function in the management of aggression and in the toleration of trauma.

This book is not intended to be a textbook of psychoanalytic theory or technique. Yet problems of both will be evident as it is read. Rather, it is intended as a window on processes of development, derailment, and repair as these are accessed, uniquely, in the analytic modality. Simultaneously, by looking at the contributions of developmental reseach and observational study, an attempt is made to fit the analytic perspective together with data from other avenues of investigation. For better or worse, I utilize my own work in this regard. I thus compound the possibility that my own biases and indiosyncracies will be communicated in undiluted form. I also want to mention that I have gone to great lengths to protect the confidentiality of my patients who have so generously given me permission to share some of their inner lives. In order to insure their anonymity I have at times resorted to the simple but effective device of manufacturing red herrings by replacing specific, but inessential biographical details with details taken from my own biography and the biography of close friends and colleagues.

For the waking, there is one world,

and it is common; but sleepers turn aside each

one into a world of his own.

—Heraclitus

2	Michael: No Face

“MY SON DAVID IS SMALL IN THE DREAM. He is thrown by my wife, Anne, onto a sharp fence and then to the ground. He screams. My daughter Angel is dancing. I am devastated and feel that I cannot be in a world which is like this. This dream reminds me of the first dream of my analysis which featured David in a concentration camp, fires burning. He clearly stands for me in both dreams. The dream from my analysis was 21 years ago; he was three then.”

Two dreams, separated by 21 years, begin this book. They are both from a man whose relationship with his own father was deeply scarred and whose relationship with his first-born son was deeply fraught. The themes of danger, intertwining identifications, and the concomitant but wholly nonameliorative presence of women are idiographic and, of course, closely related to this man’s early life experience. Given the content of the dreams, one may suspect the impact of trauma, both historical and intrafamilial. One may note too the aspect of helplessness, or at least of inactivity, on the part of the dreamer in both recitations. We might ask, where in the manifest content is the father, or at least a paternal presence, who might protect or serve to organize and modulate aggressive drive or fantasy? Why I nominate the father for this role will, I hope, become clear as I present more of our dreamer’s thoughts and some of my own as well.

In waking life, our dreamer, Michael, is a highly accomplished professor of philosophy; four years ago, he returned to analysis after a hiatus of 17 years. His son David, now 24, is a medical student on good terms with his parents and not overtly threatened by historical calamity or his mother’s outbursts. The mother is an attorney, not distinguished by either her violence or her passivity; and the daughter, Angel, 22 years of age, has been known to dance, but mostly writes poetry and studies French.

Michael recently presented a paper during a trip to Europe and experienced a reawakening of some of his family’s Holocaust history. His parents emigrated from Vienna in 1939, and many members of their Jewish family perished. His area of specialty is Nietzsche, and he is often theoretically preoccupied with the strength of men, the dimensions of power, and questions that might be regarded as bordering on misogyny. Of late, he has become quite interested in French philosophy, too, and the issues of deconstruction or, as he is inclined to put it, how to interrupt the continuity of meaning and allow for revision, reworking, and spontaneous association.

He is deeply gratified by his wife’s good nature and vibrant presence as these are differentiatable from his mother’s postwar depression and inability to intercede for him when his father was out of control. He is an active and involved father, always trying to help his children. Both, in fact, rendezvoused with their parents on the recent European journey. They are a close-knit family, perhaps too closely knit. Our dreamer feels himself to be as different from his own father as it is possible for a man to be; and yet, he is always fearful that he will either actually become like him or, worse yet, manifest all those negative qualities his father always said were there in him, qualities that are understood alternately as manifestations of character pathology and as “innate badness.”

Michael is 50 years old. He has been married for 27 years to Anne. Their marriage is good in that both can work and play, but it has not been without incident. Anne has brought her own issues to the marriage. Life has not been neutral as the children have grown, as work lives have evolved, and as anxieties have mounted. Twice over the years, Michael has fallen in love with male colleagues. Both relationships were confined to work; neither ever entered the actual sexual realm and each was intensely painful. Both men admired Michael and his work enormously and sincerely. Each idealized him as a father-mentor. In Michael the longed-for relationships evoked resonances of their developmental reciprocal, a father loving his son; Michael came to love each of the men ardently. He suffered tremendously when each relationship came apart in what might be called the almost natural chain of events. Love does not always go smoothly, especially when fueled by developmental deprivation.

Neither Erik nor Hans, the objects of Michael’s love, ever really knew that he had been chosen; certainly neither knew that he stood for Michael’s unresponsive father. Sometimes during lovemaking with Anne thoughts of Erik or Hans might enter Michael’s fantasy. These thoughts are not explicitly sexual but, rather, take the form of a present, benevolent, and supportive man helping him, being with him, looking out for him. He shares these occurrences aloud with his wife, who is accepting and not dismissive. Both understand the connection between Michael’s “forbidden” homosexuality, never enacted, and his father hunger.

Father hunger is a term I first introduced when working with young children whose fathers were unavailable because of divorce. The typical dreams of these children, and my thoughts about them, we take up in the next chapter. In Michael’s case, his father did not leave him, but their relationship bore all the manifestations of the father’s history and pathology and was thusly significantly strained.

When Michael’s father died after a long illness, Anne hoped his death would constitute a kind of liberation for her husband. The mourning period was in many ways as convoluted as the earlier relationship had been. Michael comforted his mother and siblings, wife, and children and then rushed back to his university so as not to disrupt his teaching schedule. He redoubled his efforts as mentor and guide for his students. He could not free himself from the conviction that to father others was his mission; nor could he surrender the hope contained in this very activity that somewhere there might be a father for him. This hope hovers in his consciousness but does not constitute a cure for his pain or for his longing. Michael, though tormented, is highly functional and has fathered a whole generation of graduate students and, in a sense, a school of philosophical thought. His preoccupation with the father’s role, with trauma and repair, and especially with the topics of replay, new play, and interplay occasion his appearance as this work’s frontispiece.

I view fathering from the perspectives of internal reality and of external reality—I treat the inscape (after Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1937) as a continual component, both idiographic and nomothetic, of all psychological functioning and interactive competence. The inscape, or inner landscape, is the realm of internal experience, both actual and phantasmagorical, as it exists in each person’s self-reflection and internal play space. Because I am a psychoanalyst, I draw heavily on data available to me both clinically and personally. My interest in fathering will be seen to be conjoined with thoughts about trauma and repair, about play and intrapsychic development. What emerges is my own blend, compromised, complicated, but, I hope, of heuristic value. I return to Michael repeatedly as this book unfolds. He will be joined by a number of other women and men, girls and boys, who have afforded me the privilege of sharing their innermost process, meaning, pain, and efforts at repair in the psychoanalytic Spielraum or play space. Their companions, in my thinking, are the poets, among them Rainer Maria Rilke and Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot and Paul Celan. Each in his work articulates the issues with which I am absorbed in a manner that far more directly than my prose evokes and illumines the feeling and the essence of these matters. I am immensely grateful for their companionship and for their music. For the most part, they are silent companions in this book; they are not the less present for that.

Let me provide a sample of what Michael has to say as he and I are together, listening, experiencing, trying to understand his dreams, his feelings, “the music of what happens” for him, as the poet Seamus Heaney (in Vendler, 1988) would put it, when Michael is with me and we are listening together. I have selected only a very few sequences from a long and productive piece of analytic work. My selection has been tutored by the applicability of Michael’s material to the themes of this book.

One day in the current round of the analysis, 17 years after his first round, Michael speaks with great feeling about a symptom that is not new. He has read in the International Herald Tribune a report from 1879 detailing a guillotining and describing the struggles, in vain, of the two men who were being executed. There is some hint that one of the condemned men was innocent and of a possible sadomasochistic relationship between them. Michael’s thoughts turn, as they often do, to the cruelty of man to man. He speaks of his tendency to obsess about reports of atrocities or, in this case, of executions. Then he remembers a childhood fantasy about guillotining a chicken, something he had thought he could do successfully if the blade were to descend after he had fled from the scene, only to discover afterward that, even though he had engineered the decapitation from a distance, he was still the executioner.

At this point, I, the analyst, remind Michael of our interest in his reluctance to hurt, what we have called his extreme worry about his aggression. Our code for this is his reluctance to kill mosquitoes, which we first learned about with reference to a childhood scene in which his father was jumping on the bed in his efforts to rid their hotel room of the buzzing of these insects. This scene of the father jumping on the bed has interested us from a number of perspectives. Michael responds to my comment by saying, “I could do more to the chicken than to the mosquitoes, but here it is men doing it to men.” I agree that what men do to men is of enormous concern to Michael. Often, I add, we are concerned with what one man did to him and sometimes, indeed oftentimes, what did not happen between them. Michael sighs and then says that he is smiling to himself, sort of. “What heralds the international tribunal?” he says, “It heralds that I wonder how to manage this question of who will hurt whom.”

Who will hurt whom? How is hurting to be managed? How is the result to be judged? I wish to emphasize the recurring nature of these questions in our dreamer, even after their roots have been understood, their origins reconstructed. Our topic is again the father’s role in the modulation and organization of aggressive drive and fantasy, how he teaches his son to manage the hurting. In the analysis, Michael chooses to “comanage” some of these repeating refrains with me. What does this mean? Does this make me a kind of substitute or surrogate father? If it does, is that an acceptable solution or resolution, or does it proclaim something about the gravity of the assault he has sustained or the inadequacy of our therapeutic endeavors? Are we in the realm of a neurotic history being recalled or of a traumatic past being reenacted? What does each signify? What are the expectable sequellae of each intrapsychically, interactively, and as therapeutic possibilities? How general is this process of a man needing another man to help him manage issues of hurting and being hurt? What are these issues really about? Since most men are not in analysis, are there correlates in the social order for this function. What are its developmental Anlagen? Do we observe in Michael the sequellae of a developmental deprivation, or is it a more normative need?

I hope that the conceptual road map now begins to become clear. I shall tell you of Michael’s life and struggles, of his analysis and our relationship, and of the ways in which we—he and I—have understood the origins and the meanings of his way of being. That Michael has studied psychoanalysis, too, is an immeasurable help in this endeavor. That he consents to allow his inscape and our explorations to serve as the text is but another manifestation of his extraordinary generosity. What we have figured out together is further elaborated by the commentaries of others, patients, poets, theorists and observers. I place it in the larger context of meaning, of etiology, and of derailment and repair; of treatment, hope, new play, and interplay. Let us, then, together learn more of Michael’s inscape ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Michael: No Face
• 3. Father Hunger and Children’s Dreams
• 4. Michael: The Strange Nurse Dream
• 5. Fathering Daughters and Fathering Sons
• 6. Bart and the Killer Walrus
• 7. Michael: Doing It
• 8. Michael: Looking for Father
• 9. Ali: The Mother Tongue
• 10. Ali: Opa and the Man Goose
• 11. The T Family
• 12. Dr. C: Trauma and Character
• 13. Etta: Something Is Happening
• 14. Natalia and the Bacon Factory
• 15. Expectant Fatherhood
• 16. Tommy and the Black Lion
• 17. How Do Men Get into One Another?
• 18. Boys Who Make Babies
• 19. Jonah: Someone Is Being Beaten
• 20. Afterword
• References
• Index