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In this chapter, I explore the internal world of bereaved boys who faced adolescence without their father. Furthermore, in the majority of the cases I shall present, when the father was alive he had been absent from the family and therefore had been unable to establish a proper relationship with his son. I would like to reflect on the extreme difficulties of mourning the death of an absent father and the resulting emotional struggle to cope with being an adolescent and finding a mature male identity. I base this chapter on individual psychotherapy with a number of bereaved boys aged between twelve and eighteen years.
The referrals come from a variety of sources, such as teachers, social workers, doctors, foster parents and, of course, mothers. Some older adolescents refer themselves. The case material shows that the timing and the process of referral are often important to note in understanding the conflicts of the young person and the referrer.
My patients have not only had a serious bereavement, such as the death of their fathers, either recently or earlier in their lives, but they also present a wide range of problems besides grief. The most common disturbances are drug abuse, school phobias, depression and learning difficulties. These disturbances are not only the result of their grief taking a pathological course but also because the boys referred to me all had serious problems long before their fathers died. They lived in poorly functioning families where the father was absent long before his death. Some had abused alcohol, had been violent towards members of the family or engaged in offending behaviour. The death of some fathers was apparently due to their psychopathology and, as I shall show, this made the whole process of mourning and coming to terms with the father's death extremely difficult for these young boys.
Deciding the appropriate therapeutic intervention depends on what the young person and the primary carer are able t