My father died 35 years ago today. I reflect that when he was alive I found him overwhelming and I gravitated to my mother. Yet, he was there – a balance and it turns out a vital part of developing. Even if only as a scratching post.
Donald Winnicott has a concept of “good enough” mothering. Essentially that a newborn needs love and encouragement, which he termed “maternal reverie”. He made the point that mothers do not have to be perfect, just good enough. Does this same apply to fathers? Indeed, how many now grow up in single-parent houses with no experience of one. How many of us experience a kind of “father hunger” in our life, and what does it mean to be “good enough” as a father?
I simply don’t have answers, but it is worth meditating upon. A little late for my children who are in their 30’s, but perhaps an acknowledgement of failures would help them?
I would be so interested in others’ views, and indeed I am going to make it a point to ask all the people I meet. In the meantime, at least as a start point I think there is a lot of wisdom in James Hollis’ book “Under Saturn’s Shadow”. He speaks of the burden placed by the patriarchy on men. This excerpt anyway speaks to me. It seems to me that work on the “deficit” that he refers to will never end..
All imagos are two-sided. If an image has a depth dimension it must express the dual character of reality. Acknowledging and maintaining the tension of opposites is a fundamental Jungian tenet. One-sidedness begets distortion, perversion, neurosis. Thus, for example, the archetype of the mother expresses the dual aspect of nature, that which giveth and that which taketh away. The Great Mother represents a life force that both begets and destroys, gestates and annihilates. As Dylan Thomas so succinctly put it, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower… is my destroyer”.
So , too, the archetype of the father is dual. Father gives life, light, energy – no wonder he has historically been associated with the sun. But father can also blast, wither, crush. The preliterate mind, playing with the image of the sun as centre of energy, the vitalising principle, evolved God the Father who energises and fecundates the feminine earth. Patriarchy replaced the worship of Earth Mother with that of Sky Father. (The halo associated with Christ is a relic of the solar aura of the Father even as the serpent associated with the maternal deities is spurned by the emergent patriarchy in Genesis.). When the experience of the father is positive, the child experiences strength, support, the energising of his own resources and modelling in the outer world. When the experience of the father is negative, the fragile psyche is crushed.
To use a modern metaphor, the child’s psyche is a set of potentialities, a data base to be shaped by the affirmation and modelling of the parents. Through his mother he may experience the world as a nurturing and protective environment. From father he may receive the empowerment to enter the world and to fight for his life. Of course mother can help empower him and father nurture him, but archetypally they play specific roles. Mother also actives the mother complex, which must be transformed and transcended lest he remain childlike and dependent. He must leave the world of the mother and enter that of the fathers. All mythology is a playing out of some variant of two great mythologems. The mythology of the Great Mother is the great circle, the death-rebirth motif, the Eternal Return. The mythology of the Sky Father is the quest, the journey from innocence to experience, from dark to light, from home to horizon. Each mythic cycle must be served.
When the parental imagos in the child are inadequately modelled by the parents, he carries the deficit throughout his life…