Father Hunger

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. 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. A brilliant observer and remarkably gifted, caring clinician, Herzog remains true to the ambiguities and multiple leves of meaning that arise in therapeutic encounters with real people. 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. 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 extraordinary stories of therapeutic struggle and restoration that emerge from its pages, it is a stunning testament to the resiliency of the human spirit.

James M. Herzog, M.D., is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of Hamburg, Germany.  He is an adult training and supervising analyst and a child and adolescent supervisory analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.  He is also a supervisory analyst at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Zurich, Switzerland.

Introduction. Michael: No Face. Father Hunger and Children's Dreams. Michael: The Strange Nurse Dream. Fathering Daughters and Fathering Sons. Bart and Killer Walrus. Michael: Doing It. Michael: Looking for Father. Ali: The Mother Tongue. Ali: Opa and the Man Goose. The T Family. Dr. C: Trauma and Character. Etta: Something is Happening. Natalia and the Bacon Factory. Expectant Fatherhood. Tommy and the Black Lion. How Do Men Get into One Another? Boys Who Make Babies. Jonah: Someone Is Being Beaten. Afterword.