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The book entitled The absent father effect on daughters: Father desire, father wounds by Susan Schwartz examines the profound impact of a missing father on a daughter’s psyche. This volume was the winner of the International Association for Jungian Studies Book Award for Best Clinical Book in 2021. Other books such as Father–daughter relationships: Contemporary research and issues and Improving father–daughter relationships, both by Linda Nielsen, can be read with the current book to gain a holistic view of father–daughter relationships. Schwartz opens intensely: “This is a love story, but an unrequited love,” referring to the daughter’s longing for a father who is emotionally or physically absent (p. xiii). Her primary contention is that “the presence of the father’s absence” is the most harmful element affecting a daughter’s “body, mind and soul” (p. xiii).
Schwartz emphasizes that it is this love that is lost which can cause wounds as well as evolution. After reading these 15 chapters, each chapter shows “expanding and elucidating Jungian concepts through dreams, personal stories, fairy tales and the poetry of Sylvia Plath” (p. i). In these chapters, she documents how the daughter went through constant loss and discontinuity. The narratives collected in the book are fraught with anxiety, sadness, and longing – what one description calls the “insecurity of self, the splintering and disintegration of the personality, and the silencing of voice” (p. 14).
The title of the chapter “Loss and longing” notes the constant suffering caused by the loss, and while “Father desire, father wounds” notes that the idealized or traumatized archetype of a father is within the psyche of the daughter. Even the most hidden of fantasies about the father, good or bad, Schwartz argues, may have an imposing effect on the self-concept held by the daughter. Through the analyses in “Mirroring in the dead father effect” and “Bad dad – negative father complex,” she shows how the absence of a pat