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This is a strange, fascinating, wonderful book. In a manner of speaking, it is three books in one. First of all, it is, in a meandering, slowly developing way, about the topic that gives the book its title—father hunger. Second, it is about a topic that has been a particular preoccupation of the author for some time—play, both within and outside of the analyst's work space. Finally, it is about something that, to this reader at least, forms the haunting, overwhelmingly
dominant theme of the book, although I am not sure that the author is aware that it is the theme that dominates—the Holocaust and its impact upon the offspring of its survivors.
Herzog has been studying the role of the father in the nuclear family for a long time. When I was president of my local psychiatric society over twenty years ago, I invited him to speak to our group on that topic, and his presentation was very well received. His focus that evening was upon the father's role in diluting the intensity of involvement between child and mother, so that the child can have a chance to bud off, individuate, and stand on its own. The concept of father hunger has evolved out of that earlier interest. Herzog does not explicitly define father hunger, but, as I understand it, he is referring to the effect of a father's failure to fulfill his children's need for him to be an aggressive, powerful but loving paternal figure who facilitates his children's capacity to play with, get to know, and harness their aggressive endowment so that they can use it to fuel exciting libidinal expression and effective executive activity.
Herzog states:
I am always trying to explore the ways in which the self, especially the masculine self, develops as a self-seeking entity using sameness and difference as a way of harnessing, knowing, and owning his own attributes, both facultative and problematic. [p. 2]
His book, furthermore, is “intended as a window on the processes of development, derailment, and repair as these are access