To find her centre a daughter has to turn inwards to find her life story. The parallax of her perspectives alters by recognizing the disturbances from the absent father. Sifting through and peeling off the layers of time, learned responses, the wishes covering reality takes a long time. Through all this the daughter begins to feel, think, reflect and discover herself.
Personal and collective reflections open the wounds to reveal damages and patterns, allowing the daughter to discover what can be transformed. My emphasis in this book is on the exploration of psychological life affected by the absent father personally and collectively. Focus on the daughter herself is a parallax, a twist and a purposeful change of emphasis. The daughter is one of the female archetypes in need of exploration (Porterfield, Polette, & Baumlin, 2009, p. 4) to foster individual and collective healing. To unravel the issues caused by father absence, the daughter recollects what was lost and damaged. Personally, culturally and psychologically a daughter finds her way through the generations of cumulative wounds, losses and absences, and, in the process, diverges from her fatherâs way onto her own way.
A myth of betrayal
In the ancient Greek myth of Iphigenia, her father, Agamemnon, in essence sacrificed her to get a good wind to sail to the Trojan War. While the Greek army was preparing to set sail for Troy, Agamemnon killed a sacred deer, angering the goddess Artemis. Artemis calmed all winds, so the ships could not set sail. The seer Calchas informed Agamemnon that to appease the goddess he had to sacrifice Iphigenia. Reluctant at first, Agamemnon was forced in the end to agree. He lied to his daughter and his wife, saying that Iphigenia was to marry Achilles before they left. The mother and daughter happily went to the port of Aulis, only to discover the horrible truth. Achilles, unaware his name had been used in this lie, tried to prevent the sacrifice. Iphigenia then decided to sacrifice herself in honour and of her own volition. The most popular version of what happened afterwards is that at the moment of sacrifice Artemis substituted a deer for Iphigenia and the seer Calchas, who was the only witness, remained silent. Artemis brought Iphigenia to the city of Tauris where she then became the goddessâs priestess.
This myth brings forth the archetypal story of betrayal by a father using his daughter for his benefit, resulting in her demise. She is damaged by her fatherâs personal greed and need for glory. Like so many stories and realities, it reveals one of the many iterations of the daughter betrayed, abandoned and killed, be it physically, as in this story, or psychologically.
From childhood we create complex, ongoing narratives from words, body language, emotions, images, rituals and interactions to articulate our life. Psychic growth occurs in relation to a father and a daughterâs experiences with him. When a father is absent, he neglects the relationship with his daughter. He becomes associated with yearning, sadness, frustrated love, anger and rage, oppression and desire. These contradictory feelings cause stress to body and soul, and from this comes the urgent need for the daughter to find herself.
The emphasis here is on the fatherâs betrayal, his breaking of the good paternal promise, the deprivation of support and love and its effects on the daughterâs mind, body and love for self and other. âThe primary context in which betrayal is experienced is the family, for it is there that the first love pact is sealed, a pact that menaces and at the same time makes possible individual psychological birthâ (Carotenuto, 2015, p. 43). An absent father oppresses to the extent he is and is not there. His absence contributes to a self-image as inadequate, infantile and dutiful. The daughter might also be ambivalent about her life, angry and depressed.
The father is supposed to foster emotional life and value but does not. What the daughter gets instead of love is emptiness which she can neither securely attach to nor separate from. This is often accompanied by masochistic and unloving attitudes, mostly turned onto herself. The result is confusion and denial of autonomy. She is, in effect, imprisoned with the absent father and in this place remains unconscious. The disturbance caused by an absent father early in life can set up a daughter to hate and distance herself not only from him but also from other males and be unable to access the range of the masculine and the feminine within herself.
Many daughters are raised on the myth of the daughterâfather romance. But is this myth really true? Why has this story been accepted as true even when a father has rarely been present? Remaining faithful to the myth of the father who rules and has authority has ramifications as the daughter renounces the meaning for her existence (Carotenuto, 2015, p. 52). The absence of a father sets a daughter up for anguish and disappointment, often killing her creativity and life force. Her endeavours are stamped with depression, anxiety and disturbed relationships.
Aurora dreamt there was a line of men in hats and suits. Her father was with them at a distance from her. The men had cameras from her fatherâs era. She could go with them. However, she noticed another man dressed in modern clothes, sitting on the side of the road at a table full of lovely things from the fatherâs era. He suggested she sit down, and as she did so he gave her an iPhone filled with photos of her current home, the area across the street and one of her favourite women poets.
As we discussed the dream, Aurora did not think to associate the men with her father. Although this might be an obvious association, she had been so hurt by him and cruelly rejected she had erased all else but the dull reaction of duty.
The dream brought up memories of his emotional stoicism and lack of love or kindness. Her father was absent in quite radical ways, even bordering on the perverse in his lack of attention. Out in the world he was lauded and the centre of attention, a quite charismatic man. At home, however, he was mean and selfish, a patriarchal presence, stern, demanding, forbidding, rarely present, filled with rules of how to be, pointing out how she fell short. The contrast was confusing, and she could tell no one how she suffered his lack of love. Who would believe her? Moreover, he ignored her or his comments to her were derisive. Nothing she did gained any good recognition. Yet she anticipated his coming home when he did. He had an extensive library, and she snuck out the books she loved to read. She did not tell him because she knew she would be punished or put down. Yet he was better than her mother who ignored her altogether.
In the dream the man by the roadside, although sitting down with a cane and seemingly tired, had lovely things from the fatherâs era. She could take a picture with the iPhone, a modern camera, and see the surroundings from her viewpoint. She did not have to go the fatherâs way, although the dream paradoxically recognized some value there. Perhaps she had yet to discover the value as it had been obstructed by his abrupt, cold and dismissive manner towards her. Currently she was at a crossroads: a relationship had ended, her career was in question, physical issues needed attention. The dream and her associations illustrated the divergence from the father, his rules and authoritarianism. Had she, however, retained an unconscious identification with him although she had determined to be otherwise?
Her primary relationship for many years was with someone equally distant and unemotional, someone who wanted things done but who expressed little warmth and connection. She had to keep proving her worth. She did not get her needs met, but then she was not in touch with them. She had no place to get care. Long ago she had learned not to go to her father for anything as he would just be cold and forbidding and accuse her of wanting too much. Even as a child she could not ask for his attention. She avoided him so much she had few memories and did not ever question the situation, as there were no answers. Over the years, at each upsetting or shocking event, she kept emotions locked up inside herself, never sharing them as she felt rejected and shut off. She defied her father with her ambition and intellect, needing to prove her worth and him wrong. All her energy went into her career as a high-level executive, and she often worked 100 hours a week.
After her father died, she recognized the emptiness of her emotional life and left the relationship with the woman who felt like her family. Although the relationship had been emotionally empty, it was all she knew. When we began meeting, she was in her mid-forties and this was her first therapeutic venture into her interior self. Over time she began to value what proved to be her rich inner world, looking forward to the feelings she now noticed, the dreams she recorded and the thoughts she had. She became eager to learn more and to put the pieces of her life together. From her fatherâs absence and his lack of emotionality and putting her needs down, she had learned self-avoidance. This had repeated itself in her primary relationship for 15 years, until after her fatherâs death when the emotions came pouring out. As she said, she had blown apart her life and was eagerly exploring what she had formerly ignored.
Catastrophe of absence
When absent, a father cannot reflect to a daughter a separate and individual self. Instead, he represents a locus of distress, and she searches anxiously and in vain for connection. She is disappointed in the shattering of wishes while retaining an attitude of denial concerning what has happened. The catastrophe of absence takes time to recognize. âThe only paradises cannot be those that are lost, but those that are unlocked as a result of coercion, reluctance, cajolery and humiliation, their thresholds crossed without calm prescience, or any preliminary perspicacityâ (Rose, 1996, p. 35). Digesting reality slowly brings the demise of the pretend fantasy father. In order to make sense of what is not understandable, a daughter often accepts blame for their lack of relationship. As Jung commented, âUntil you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fateâ (Jung, 1968, para. 126).
The absence of father love includes his enactment of ambivalent, inconsistent or downright hostile behaviours with and around the daughter. The world becomes rejecting, and she is static, refusing it all â passion, love, feeling, emotion, being. She needs help out of this incomprehensible catastrophe, help to not take it in and re-create the loss internally and in other relationships. The absence is âan intermediary situation between presence ⌠and lossâ (Urribarri, 2017). In other words, and from a perspective seeking personality expansion, absence stands in the centre of the experiences of presence and loss.
The absence of a personal father impacts the way a daughter internalizes the collective psychological and social norms influencing her identity. Frustration and anger turn not outwards to the father, as he is not there, but inwards towards herself. For many daughters to face this means confronting the unacceptable, the disillusions, betrayals and lies, which are also promulgated by society and culture.
The fatherâs distance can be measured in the psychic space created by his absence. Facing this, she can no longer deny what it is to be without love, regard and importance. Behind hate for the father absence is the desire for love, which can become a fascination that can rivet the daughter to the father. Curiously this lure becomes stronger when a father has not offered himself for identification and does not welcome the daughter into his life. Nevertheless, and even more so because he is absent, he remains significant in her mind.
The lost, absent father demands attention at the same time he has been withholding it. Given all this, how curious it is that there has been such a scarcity of reflection on the father as a significant member...
