On Fathers . . .

ON FATHERS . . .

Finding our Fathers … Samuel Osherson Notes...

Until a man “names his father,” sees him clearly as who he is and was, it is that much more difficult for him to grow up himself and become a father to his children, a husband to a wife, or a mentor to the younger generation at work. That is every man’s task of healing the wounded father within.”

The role of our fathers:

… the boy is searching deeply throughout his childhood, beginning around age three, for a masculine model on which to build his sense of self.

Little boys begin to segregate by sex, to focus on rules rather than relationships, and to emphasize games of power, strength and achievement.

Boys have to give up mother for father, but who is father?

If father is not there to provide a confident, rich model of manhood, then the boy is left in a vulnerable position: having to distance himself from mother without a clear and understandable model of male gender upon which to base his emerging identity.

Distortions and myths shape normal men’s pictures of their fathers, based on the uneasy peripheral place fathers occupied in their homes,. Boys grow into men with a wounded father within, a conflicted inner sense of masculinity rooted in men’s experience of their fathers as rejecting, incompetent, or absent.

The interviews I have had with men in their thirties and forties convince me that the psychological and physical absence of fathers from their families is one of the great underestimated tragedies of our times. (Sternbach survey.. “only 15% of Sternbach’s cases [71] showed evidence of fathers appropriately involved with their sons, with a history of nurturance and trustworthy warmth and connection. (23% physically absent, 29% psychologically absent with work, 18% psychologically absent who were austere, moralistic and emotionally uninvolved, 15% dangerous and out of control).

The sense of loss extends into adulthood, as many sons try to resolve their sense of guilt, shame and anger at their fathers in silent, hidden and ambivalent ways.

Mothering is a close, tactile holding and caregiving, while fathering is more amorphous. We know our fathers from a distance; they may be warm but are usually more remote.

Early on we experience women as the ones who fill us up, who comfort and take care of us, without having an opportunity in growing up to learn how to fill ourselves and to feel full while truly separate from women.

The end result of the boy’s separation-individuation struggle is that men carry around as adults a burden of vulnerability, dependency, or emptiness within themselves, still grieving, reliving a time when going to mother for help as they wanted to was inappropriate, and they wouldn’t or couldn’t go to father with the confusion, anger, or sadness they felt.

… men subtly look to their wives to take care of them in ways that they cannot ask for directly and often are not themselves aware of.

Family Life Today

Current family situations are rekindling issues of separation and loss that men have not had a chance to work out in growing up.

In growing up men have great difficulty coming to terms with dependency and vulnerability, often because our fathers showed us that such feelings were unacceptable, that to be successful men, to win our father’s approval, achievement was what counted.

… men are not being sheltered from parts of life they had to repress or devalue in order to grow up.

Both sexes today seem to share a stereotype: that men are distant and unconnected, while relationships are the female specialty. Many people believe that women care more than men about love. Yet the division of the sexes into men as rational and women as feelers is simply untrue, a harmful and dangerous myth. For all that feminism has contributed to our culture, it has also brought with it a subtle idealization of women and a less subtle denigration or misunderstanding of men.

Much of the hunger for intimacy that many men reveal, is actually an attempt to heal the wound within ourselves, so that we can become more confident and nurturing as men.

UNSPOKEN DEBTS: MEN’S STRUGGLE TO SEPARATE FROM FATHER

What does stand out in men’s talk of their fathers is a mysterious, remote quality. Whether describing heroes, villains, or someone inbetween, most men know little of their fathers inner lives, what they thought and felt as men.

… but as we age into our thirties and forties the need for reconnecting becomes more pressing…

What is striking about Rubin’s data is how few fathers and sons achieve that connection, how many men experience “father hunger.”

Like the red-eyed financier, men often seem on the one hand to want their father’s love but also not to want it, to prove that they can get along without it.

For years my father felt like a heavy weight to me, an immoveable force I could neither approach nor avoid, pressing on me with his remote sadness and distant judgemental quality.

The Wounded Father

The wounded father is the internal sense of masculinity that men carry around within them. It is an inner image of father that we experience as judgemental and angry or, depending on our relationship with father, as needy and vulnerable. When a man says he can’t love his children because he wasn’t loved well enough, it is the wounded father he is struggling with.

The Wounded Father As Misidentification

The fundamental male vulnerability rooted in the experience of father lies in our fantasies and myths to explain why father isn’t there….

The son may experience his father’s preoccupation with work or emotional unavailability at home as his own fault. It’s because of something the son has done that father doesn’t pay attention to him.

Many men I have interviewed carry around a feeling of both having betrayed their father and having been betrayed by him.

… traditionally how men express love: by performing, being instrumental and taking care of, by protecting and providing.

…male undergraduates talked about themselves more with their mothers than with their fathers and were more satisfied with their relations with their mothers. The undergraduates complained most that their fathers were cold and uninvolved, giving too little of themselves. As we’ll see, men report being able to test limits and reality with mothers in ways they seem unable to with their fathers.

… you always had the sense that he had great feeling for you…

Dad, what are you feeling? Why do you work so hard? What do you expect of me? Why do I feel so angry and overburdened by you? .. all the existential questions that adolescent and even younger children normally have to answer as they grow. To fill the vacuum, many sons resort to fantasy, unconsciously developing explanations for why father is the way he is and why the relationship is the way it is. A man may feel unconsciously as if he drove his father out of the house, perhaps winning the oedipal battle…

The secretly Vulnerable Father

The traditional role of father in the family secretly communicated a sense of weakness to sons, which underlies the wounded father within men today.

He is the real-world caretaker, she the emotional caretaker. That arrangement gives mothers tremendous power in the family. They become the “affective switchboards” in the family, the center of the communication pattern; the kids turn to mother to deal with their dad, while father comes to depend on mother to tell him about what happened at home while he was gone…

As children get older, father can be pushed even farther to the periphery of the family. Here is where the family pattern of ‘protective denial’ becomes particularly destructive to sons, as their view of their father comes to be largely shaped by mother.

Some men may develop openly degraded, frightening ideas about their fathers.

… what happens to many sons in traditional marriages: They learn about their fathers through their mothers, absorbing a distorted image of their fathers and of masculinity.

Sons become uncomfortable allies of their mothers in the parental struggle with family roles and marital power.

Not only do grown sons struggle with a sense of not knowing how to behave as full men in the family, but also there is an emotional shadow over the family – it is a place where men become weak, needly little boys.

It is easy to underestimate the magical powers that men attribute to women. They are the masters of the interpersonal, feeling world in men’s unconscious, as our experience of women is rooted in early experiencing of mother. If women have the power to reduce men to weakness, a determination to avoid being vulnerable to one’s wife can form.

… the son may come to fear what he sees as the feminine wish to destroy men, to make them weak, needy, and helpless.

The Angry Father

Many men carry around within themselves an angry or judgemental father. We feel our fathers to be disappointed in us.

We unconsciously imagine that father will get even with us for our betrayal of him.

Many men idealize their fathers, make them bigger than life, because they once felt too strong for their own good and now imagine a father who will punish them for their sins.

The Fierce Tears of Our Fathers

Many of our fathers were not very happy men. Many of them were secretly angry or depressed, feeling considerable rage and depression at the traditional bargain they had made with their wives, exiled from their families, consigned to the public world of work.

There may be a kind of intergenerational revenge here, with some men acting out their father’s hidden rage at their wives and children, even as these grown men are trying to be more nurturant husbands and fathers.

The lack of a fuller emotional repertoire between father and son is often taken to mean that as sons get older they lack male models of emotional accessibility.

Our fathers perhaps secretly feared us too. The ambivalent love between fathers and sons is underestimated. It is the dark side of the high value boys are given in our society. Since so much of male identity is based on performance, sons will someday outdistance Dad. We become ambivalent objects, loved and feared by our fathers.

Our fear is of hurting him or being hurt by him. Those two themes are acted out over and over again in the adult life of men: the search for and rejection of our fathers.

The Mother’s Role

The result of the more open communication between son and mother is that the son may have a better, earlier chance to work out separation issues with her than with his father.

…boys often view their fathers as “helpful in a utilitarian sense” but “lacking significant personal and emotional involvement.”

One wonders what would happen if fathers played a more salient affective-expressive role during their sons’ early developmental years, particularly before age five.

Such rituals and rites defuse the intensity of the individual father-son relationship, providing both parties with what they so desperately need: a blessing from the make community, a welcome from fathers to their sons, and a thank-you from the sons to the fathers; a ritual purging of the tension and betrayals of growing up male.

The Impossible Wish to Be a Good Son

I have the impression that today the wish for forgiveness and reconciliation with father ofen goes unmet. Within the family fathers cannot communicate a sense of benevolent masculinity to their sons, and culturally we have distorted social rituals and initiation ceremonies. The rites of passage common to men in adolescence and young adulthood today involve joining such institutions as the army, football teams, medical schools and large corporations. Those institutions pay upon the young man’s wish for an idealized father to love him, offering an exaggeratedly masculine way to live up and be a good son.

If mothers become life giving earth in the unconscious of men, then fathers become wrathful, judgmental gods.

What do not go away are the sons’ wishes to obtain their fathers’ love and to be good son’s at last.

… to pay back an unspoken debt, in a word to be a good son, finally, at the very same time as we confront social demands that we be truly different from our fathers.

The Wish for Odysseus

… emphasize men’s need to heal the wounded father within…

.. the great recognition scene in the Odyssey captures the wishes of both men better than the more familiar Oedipal drama…

“When the great warrior King Odysseus returns home from more than a decade of wandering he and the princely Telemachus hardly know each other. In a stunning moment the unconquerable warrier reveals himself to his teenage son:

‘I am that father whom your boyhood lacked and suffered pain for lack of. I am he… This is not princely to be swept away by wonder at your father’s presence. No other Odysseus will ever come, for he and I are one, the same…

Throwing his arms around theis marvel of a father, Telemachus began to weep. Salt tears rose from the wells of longing in both men, and cries burst forth from both as keen and fluttering as those of the great taloned hawk, whose nestlings farmers take before they fly. So helplessly they cried pouring out tears, and might have gone on weeping till sundown.”

The wells of longing in both men. The Odysseus myth points to a deep yearning for each other in both father and son, and it contains lesson for our times.

Odysseus shows his son how to be a man and gives him confidence in his own strength.

We need the father who helps us define masculine strength in a changing world, what Robert Bly has colled “the moist father,” strong and present man in new, unfamiliar situations.

We have grown up thinking of Oedipal rivalry between father and son, the guilty wish to surpass the father, but we need also attend to the Odysseus theme, the wish to be like father, to find a father, a sturdy man we can rely on.

Until a man “names his father,” sees him clearly as who he is and was, it is that much more difficult for him to grow up himself and become a father to his children, a husband to a wife, or a mentor to the younger generation at work. That is every man’s task of healing the wounded father within.”