Susan E. Schwartz

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.

Father Desire, Father Wounds

The Absent Father Effect on Daughters

Absent Father Effect on Daughters

This insightful book explores the ‘as-if’ personality through the lens of Jungian analytical psychology, illuminating how the same forces that can disturb personal development relationally, socially and culturally are equally an impetus toward expressing and relating with one's more complete self. The book describes persons expressing an ‘as if’ personality as facing a conundrum around whether to hide or expose the truth of who they are. It describes the analytic container as a place of growth from that place, affecting person and culture, self and other. Using a myriad of clinical examples (across a range of cultures, contexts and personal experiences), the author describes people who are moving through feelings of not belonging, sexual addiction, ageing, the cultural influence of social media, the role of the father, and body image challenges. All these issues reveal the valuable recognition of the unconscious- a hallmark of Jungian analytical psychology- incorporates the dissociated others into selfhood. The theories of French psychoanalysts Andre Green on absence and the negative, Julia Kristeva on abjection, French philosopher Jacques Derrida on Narcissus and Echo and American philosopher Judith Butler on precarity expand the Jungian analytical thought to reflect the multiplicity of the psyche. Using understandable language to interweave various psychoanalytical and philosophical frameworks, Imposter Syndrome and the ‘As-If’ Personality in Analytical Psychology: The Fragility of Self is both accessible to general readers and highly relevant to professional analysts, therapists, clinicians and social workers.

Susan E. Schwartz

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