A father who is absent – whether due to untimely death, a demanding job, family breakup, or simply an inability to step up and meet his children’s needs – may deprive his children of the emotional bedrock they require. They can struggle to access their capacity for aggression and creativity, or to build the self-esteem necessary for successful adult relationships.
As many fairy tales show us, an absent father is sometimes experienced alongside an abusive mother, leaving a complicated legacy of emotional wounding to be worked through. First of all, the abuse must be confronted, and then the failure of the absent parent to witness or protect.
Jung’s life offers us fascinating material with which to explore the impact of the absent father. His father’s powerlessness as an uninspired, struggling pastor planted the seed of Jung’s lifelong quest for the numinous. As a father himself, Jung paid little attention to his children as he developed his life’s work and maintained a relationship with his collaborator Toni Wolff alongside his marriage to Emma Jung.
Join Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano and Deborah Stewart this week as they explore what it means to be an absent father, and how we might both survive and transcend the legacy of such a parent.
In the episode we cover:
The role of the father
Whilst individual families do things differently, the “father energy” in the home will often involve children being encouraged out of their comfort zones, and helped to go confidently into a more adult world – the weekend outing may be to Home Depot rather than the indoor playground.
Good fathers impart to their children a confidence that they will meet the challenges the world offers, balancing the nurturing, protective mother energy in the home.
The father figure may be the one who is more physical with the children: roughhousing, taking them out to the yard to throw a ball, or showing them the ropes of a favorite sport.
Fiction shows us models of the present, engaged father, for example, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s father in Little House on the Prairie, who passed on wisdom about life while working alongside his children in the fields.
Modernity and the absent father
As we transitioned to an urban, modern, industrialized economy, it became harder for fathers to spend time with children while engaging together in the work of the family. Many people now experienced fathers who spent most of the week at work and who had scarce emotional energy for family time. The development of the culture over the course of most of modern history seemed to mediate against men being allowed the time or the emotional development to be effective as fathers.
In the case of divorce, some fathers have had the experience of being legally or financially manouevered into the position of absent father, against their will or desire. They may struggle to connect with children they see infrequently or outside their daily routine.
Fortunately in recent decades we have seen more support for fathers’ practical and emotional involvement with their children (see our episode on Stay At Home Dads for more on this). This still leaves many of us, however, with a profound sense of grief at having missed a full experience of the love and learning involved in a healthy father-child relationship.
The protective function of the father
The absent father leaves the child fully exposed to the uncertainties of fate, rather than performing a protective role. In some cases, this might involve abandoning him or her to an abusive or neglectful mother.
A father’s absence may also look like a refusal to step up. For example, he may fail to put guardrails on a child’s access to technology, perhaps with a fatalistic acceptance that “the world is what it is”. As with the father in Beauty and the Beast who allows his daughter to sacrifice herself to the Beast, a child is allowed to go out unprotected into a world of entirely foreseeable dangers.
The father wound
“It is a sophisticated game of hide-and-seek in which it is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found” (D.W. Winnicott, The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott: Volume 6, 1960-1963, Ch.8, p.439).
Part of the tragedy of the absent father lies in his child’s grief at not seeing herself reflected in his loving gaze. The person that should be guiding, teaching and protecting fails to find his own offspring worth his time and energy. This can leave a child with a legacy of poor self-esteem which makes it difficult to navigate life’s hurdles.
Linda Leonard writes extensively of the father wound in her book,The Wounded Woman. Girls may expend tremendous energy trying to please their father, becoming highly skilled in areas where they think they can win his approval. They may also obsessively avoid causing “trouble” of any kind, becoming highly conforming and ego-gratifying for the father.
A father’s determined neglect despite his daughter’s efforts to win love and attention leads to psychological wounds that can make future relationships difficult. If the first man in your life did not really pay attention or take an interest in you, this leaves a complicated legacy to work through in terms of asking for your needs to be met by an adult partner. Although Leonard’s book is concerned with women, this is also very applicable to many men’s experiences.
For men, there is also the added fact that they have not had a father present in their lives to model the task of being a man in the world: as partner, father or as a contributor to society.
Fathering is also strongly linked to our capacity for creativity. The phallic energy of striving in the world to carve out a career and claim the role you would like to perform is very much related to one’s relationship with the father. It may take work for the child of an absent father to begin accessing their full creative potential.
In the case of an absent father, one’s sense of self-worth is undermined, access to aggression may be lacking, and a kind of emotional foundation is missing. The child, when an adult, may suffer constant questioning and insecurity around whether they are “good enough”. This underdevelopment of the internal masculine can be highly restricting if not addressed.
The absent father and the negative mother
The absent father may often also be paired with an abusive mother. Where there is an abusive parent, it is frequently the case that there is another parent who averts their gaze.
In therapy, people work through their experience with an abusive parent and then eventually arrive at the point of examining the other parent. This wound may at times be even deeper, because the absent parent failed to protect against the abuse, or made the choice not to see it.
This theme is reflected in fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, Snow White and Cinderella, where we might ask where the father is whilst the children suffer the abuse of stepmothers.
The Juniper Tree is a less well-known tale which explores the absent father theme even more dramatically – a father who chooses not to see what is right in front of him is tricked into eating his own son, cooked into a stew by a malevolent stepmother. The wilfully blind father asks “where’s my son?” whilst at the same time reaching for the spoon with which to eat him.
Where do children turn in a father’s absence?
Many children with an absent father may instead turn for guidance to their peer group. This leaves them at the mercy of a less mature, less connected group of people, who are unlikely to have the capacity to meet their developmental needs.
Jung and the absent father
Jung’s experience of his father’s weakness and failure to provide meaningful guidance loomed over his whole life. Jung’s relationship with Freud was one of the most profound of his lifetime, despite it ending in schism. We can see Jung’s search for a mentor and a father figure in the depth of this bond, and his pain at its rupture.
Jung’s father, Paul Jung, was a pastor who could not experience the numinous side of religion and was without a meaningful vocation. Jung, living through a childhood tinged with this sometimes depressive parent, went on to make a life work out of examining what a numinous experience might be, and discovering how to reclaim it. In the end, the wound left by his absent father enriched him personally, as well as the many who benefit from his work today.
Later in his life, Jung’s children also experienced him as an absent father, as is documented in Deirdre Bair’s Jung: A Biography:
“Franz Jung, who for many complex reasons always took his mother’s side within the family dynamic, described her plight: ‘Can you imagine living with a man who left you with full responsibility for his house and his children while he passed the time playing their games or being in that same house with another woman?’ Franz also told the poignant story of a rare occasion when Jung took his four older children sailing and bought them sweets when they docked at a village on the lake: “When we got home, Marianne ran across the lawn to Mother and cried, “Just look! Franz’s father bought me a little cake”. Of course Mother immediately said, ‘Now, look, Marianne, you must understand that Franz’s father is your father too!’” (p.251).
As the father who spent little time with his children and failed fully to notice them, Jung himself offers a poignant representation of the absent father.
What to do with the absent father wound?
Jung was able to take his father wound and forge a life’s work from the pain of it. We do not have to be defined by the suffering this particular childhood experience might have caused us. Ideally, we examine and name the nature of our absent father experience without creating a self-limiting narrative. We can ask ourselves, what seed was planted in us by our experience of fathering, and how might we nurture it and grow into our full Self?
Here’s the dream we analyze
I walked up to an old Catholic cathedral with two other people, a couple, and one was named “Trinity.” Mass was going to begin soon, but we were just looking at the big front doors. There were two curved staircases leading up to the doors, above which were some stained glass windows. Between the staircases was an old fountain. By the door, there was a broken bell on the ground. I said we should ring that bell on the next big holiday (I believe I said Easter, but I’m not sure). There were two large volumes and some papers also near the door. The books were green. Trinity wanted to sharpen her pencil. There happened to be both a dispenser with old pencils and a pencil sharpener. When I tried to sharpen her pencil, it was sucked up by the sharpener. Then I tried to get her another from the dispenser. The first was too old and short, so I put it through the sharpener, and it was eaten up. I then got a second one, and I tried sharpening it without having it sucked up. I was only able to sharpen it a little bit.
I looked down the steps and saw Trinity somehow stuck in a terrarium or aquarium filled with water. It floated into the air, and she was trying to get out. Time kept ticking by, and she became more frantic. For some reason, I grabbed the two green volumes and a large piece of parchment, but that didn’t do anything. She eventually got out safely. Somehow the books ended up being in the fountain.
Suddenly there were a lot of people there, including a cardinal. The cardinal was walking up to the doors and I hurried down. Parishioners noticed the books and tried to get them by using the hems of their shirts to paddle the water toward themselves. A priest with long shaggy gray beard and hair yelled, “Why are you not wading into the water to save the precious word?! Are your clothes more important than the word of God?
Resources discussed in this episode
- Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography
- Linda Schierse Leonard, The Wounded Woman: Healing the Father-Daughter Relationship
- Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie
- D.W. Winnicott, The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott: Volume 6, 1960-1963, Ch.8.
- The Juniper Tree fairy tale can be read here.
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