This episode’s guest is Susan E. Schwartz, PhD: a writer, Jungian analyst trained in Zürich, Switzerland, and a licensed clinical psychologist with a private practice in Paradise Valley, Arizona.
Show notes:
Why the father is culturally absent from literature.
What is the father archetype, and what are good and bad expressions of it.
The somatic imprint of growing up with an absent father.
What happens when a father is absent for most of a daughter’s life but returns later to pursue a relationship that’s based on his need for connection.
The evil of remaining unconscious.
The dead father effect and the impulse to rescue the father.
Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath’s relationships to their absent fathers.
The father’s gaze, and the link between the absent father wound and auto-immune disease.
The as-if personality, the puella archetype, narcissism.
Finding oneself through the absent father wound, bearing the pain, how to heal through relationships based on emotions and love, and how to fill the absence.
Dept of further investigation:
Buy Susan’s book from her website, Amazon, Karnac
Daddy by Sylvia Plath
Mirror by Sylvia Plath
The Dead Mother book by Andre Green
Music: Father’s Song by Missin Red
“There is a treachery, a secret psychic death that begins in childhood when a child is unloved and unseen, the ‘I’ unnoticed. A centre of gravity that should be internalised becomes loosened and damaged.”
-Susan E. Schwartz, The Absent Father Effect on Daughters
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