Description - Father Hunger by James Herzog
James M. Herzog's Father Hunger: Explorations with Adults and Children will quickly take its place both as a landmark contribution to developmental psychology and as an enduring classic in the clinical literature of psychoanalysis. We live in an era when a great many children grow up without a father, or, worse still, with fathers who traumatically abuse them. Yet, society continues to ignore the emotional price that children pay, and often continue to pay throughout their lives, for this tragic state of affairs. At the heart of this lack of compassionate responsibility is our collective failure to comprehend the distinctive role of fathers in the normal development of children. Father Hunger will change this situation. First drawn to his topic by observing the recurring nightmares of clinic-referred children of newly separated parents - nightmares in which the children's fear of their own aggression was coupled with desperate wishes for their fathers' return - Herzog went on to spend more than two decades exploring the role of the father in a variety of naturalistic settings.
He discovered that the characteristically intense manner in which fathers engaged their children provided an experience of contained excitement that served as a necessary scaffolding to the children's emerging sense of self and as a potential buffer against future trauma. But it was in Herzog's consulting room, where he worked with children and adults alike, that the real cost of not having a father became clear. Few books have ever captured in such intimate detail the "feel" of the actual engagement of child and adult patients in psychoanalytic treatment. And fewer still have been able to convey a heartfelt sense of the enormous risks these patients must take as they struggle to recover from the derailments of their lives to date. A brilliant observer and remarkably gifted, caring clinician, Herzog remains true to the ambiguities and multiple levels of meaning that arise in therapeutic encounters with real people. At the same time, he consistently locates his therapeutic strategies and clinical discoveries within a sophisticated observational framework, thus making his formulations about father hunger and its remediation of immediate value to scientific researchers.
For clinicians, Herzog opens up new conceptual demains by relating the management of aggression to the vicissitudes of trauma and developmental repair. For lay readers, Herzog provides a twofold gift. He identifies the essential psychological elements of successful fathering and explains, in a highly accessible manner, why these features of "normal" fathering matter so much to children. And he then explores, in a gripping manner that will envelop all readers, the meaning and tragic consequences of the absent father as manifested in the intensely private pain, compulsion, and longing of father hunger. A model of humane psychoanalytic exploration in response to a deepening social problem, Father Hunger is a clinical document destined to raise public consciousness and help shape social policy. And in the extraordinarily stories of therapeutic struggle and restoration that emerge from its pages, it is a stunning testament to the resiliency of the human spirit.
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