The Half-Alive Ones

This Paper was conceived while working with my first training patient, but it did not take shape until when I was invited to give a lecture on the topic at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. The request stemmed from my review of Marriage—Dead or Alive (SELIGMAN 13), and I chose to focus on the pattern of the parental marriage, with special reference to the rôle of the father in personality formation. Furthermore, I was unexpectedly asked to do two radio call-in programmes on the same subject. A remarkable feature was that the lecture stimulated, in the main, questions from separated and divorced members of the audience concerned for their fatherless children. The radio callers were exclusively fathers at the point of separation from their wives, desperate about the threatened loss of their children, or else men who had taken on children who were not their own and who were deeply troubled about whether these children would ever accept them as their father.

As an analyst, I had been preoccupied with the inner world of the many patients who presented, and described themselves, as ‘half-alive’, and I continued my search for some common denominators. They appeared to dwell, as it were, in a state of permanent twilight, of non-differentiation, inexorably trapped. I remember an extreme example, a woman recently divorced, suffering from an acute phobic condition, obsessed with a fear that the sun would never rise again, and that she would spend the rest of her life in everlasting darkness. In the course of her analysis it transpired that, on the one hand, she felt herself to be almost irresistibly pulled back into the powerful, but suffocating, dark embrace of her mother, represented also by her husband, and on the other, she longed to come alive as herself, discovering and developing her own atrophied identity. It was an interminable tug-of-war. She came from a broken home and was effectively a fatherless child. Jung has pointed out that ‘the sun is a symbol of