06/21/2023
~The Absent Father Effect on Daughters
There is no question that fathers play an important role in their daughters lives. An involved father is crucial for psychological, behavioural and general health and well-being. Having a related father figure helps a daughter as she needs his wisdom, experience, imparting of skills and kindly guidance. When fathers are actively present in a loving nurturing relationship, daughters have greater self confidence, perform better in school and are able to avoid risky behaviour.
The father is ideally an anchor, giving the daughter a foundation, a solid point of reference. Yet when absent, her experiences of self are achieved against the background of loss. This influences how she does or does not cope with the inevitable vicissitudes experienced throughout life. When the father is absent, she is susceptible to the invasion of negative images and behaviours.
The mirroring of father to daughter is made up of his empathic responses to her needs, wishes, experiences, behaviours and gives legitimacy, validation and a sense of worth.
The search for the father is the search for herself. It resides in the place she doesn't yet know.
The longing for the father, for good attention and support are never met and can prevent her from receiving and expressing pleasure.
When the father has emotionally disappeared or is a stranger, the daughter is left with a gap where the kind and loving father should be. His absence is a haunting presence as daughters report bleak, tonally inert, intimately blank relationships. The influence can create unreal mechanical reactions.
Too few opportunities for good experiences between a father and daughter pass on a legacy of non involvement and personal detachment. Her actions become inhibited, emotional development arrested and adult maturity faked. Without sufficient emotional connection, attachment becomes disjointed and inhibited.
Internally alone, she might be sexually frozen, unconsciously preserved in a childish way, appearing helpless, dependent, or at times, inappropriately aggressive. Psychologically she is affectively deadened and unable to move out of the internalized isolation. She is either so self-focused the other is not included or so other-focused that she is eliminated. This is what she picks up from the father not there for reciprocity of interaction.
In reaction a daughter might become defensive, the complexes rigid and persona over or under developed, her natural self absent. The internalisation of this form of the absent father threatens the daughters separate identity. Defenses are forms of narratives, created in imagination and fantasy to support a positive sense of identity and personal worth when these are threatened by cruelty, hostility or indifference from those on whom we are most dependent.
She had not allowed herself to feel. From her emotionally absent father she learned forced adaptability, vigilant and watching behaviour and to quell her desires.
The desire to know him was the desire to know herself.
When the childhood paradise is destroyed too early with a father's absence prior to the time of natural separation, the emotional disturbance can feel like a crime against the daughters personality, often resulting in self persecutory actions and internal vengeance.
The negative father complex can alienate her from her body, and various physical reactions point to anxieties about unmet needs and desires.
A daughter learns to compensate with persona formation, as if there is no problem. But this persona is like a carapace or shell and is not always internally connected to the real inside. It becomes a deceptive pseudo covering to compensate for the discontinuous emotions, identified with filling a role and acting.
~ Susan E. Schwartz, The Absent Father Effect on Daughters. https://amzn.to/449AzjZ
art | Wallace Polsom, The Absent Father (for Sylvia Plath) (2019), paper collage, 16.6 x 24.2 cm. https://amzn.to/43ZTRbm
