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It has been two decades since James Herzog (1980, 1982) first contributed to efforts by psychoanalysts to compensate for Freud's one-sided view of the father as the threatening castrating competitor of the boy of oedipal age. Herzog began by studying 18- to 28-month-old boys whose night terrors were found to be associated with the loss of their fathers through separation or divorce. He suggested that these boys needed their fathers to help manage their rapprochement-stage aggressive impulses. The absence of this paternal help led the boys to turn their aggression towards their selves and then to project it in the form of their fears at night.
Herzog continued linking aggression to father loss two years later, when he noted that children of both genders had problems modulating their aggression after they had lost their fathers through divorce. This finding led him to posit a new developmental role for the father—the regulation of aggressive drive and fantasy. The loss of the father created an affective state, father hunger, in which the child craved and fantasised the father's return in order to modulate his or her aggressive impulses. For Herzog, the father's role was inextricably intertwined with affect regulation.
The publication of this book, then, brings the expectation that it will build on and deepen