The Wounded Woman

Healing the Father-Daughter Relationship

Linda Schierse Leonard

• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Year: 1982
• ISBN:
  9780804040020
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

This book is an invaluable key to self-understanding. Using examples from her own life and the lives of her clients, as well as from dreams, fairy tales, myths, films, and literature, Linda Schierse Leonard, a Jungian analyst, exposes the wound of the spirit that both men and women of our culture bear—a wound that is grounded in a poor relationship between masculine and feminine principles.

Leonard speculates that when a father is wounded in his own psychological development, he is not able to give his daughter the care and guidance she needs. Inheriting this wound, she may find that her ability to express herself professionally, intellectually, sexually, and socially is impaired. On a broader scale, Leonard discusses how women compensate for cultural devaluation, resorting to passive submission ("the Eternal Girl"), or a defensive imitation of the masculine ("the Armored Amazon").

The Wounded Woman shows that by understanding the father-daughter wound and working to transform it psychologically, it is possible to achieve a fruitful, caring relationship between men and women, between fathers and daughters, a relationship that honors both the mutuality and the uniqueness of the sexes.

I.

THE WOUNDING

my father was not in the telephone book

in my city;

my father was not sleeping with my mother

at home;

my father did not care if I studied the

piano;

my father did not care what

I did;

and I thought my father was handsome and I loved him and I wondered

why

he left me alone so much,

so many years

in fact, but

my father

made me what I am

a lonely woman

without a purpose, just as I was

a lonely child

without any father. I walked with words, words, and names,

names. Father was not

one of my words.

Father was not

one of my names.

Diane Wakoski
“The Father of My Country”

CHAPTER ONE

THE FATHER-DAUGHTER WOUND

Now all the plagues that in the pendulous air
Hang fated o’er men’s faults light on thy
daughters!

Shakespeare

Every week wounded women come into my office suffering from a poor self-image, from the inability to form lasting relationships, or from a lack of confidence in their ability to work and function in the world. On the surface these women often appear quite successful—confident businesswomen, contented housewives, carefree students, swinging divorcees. But underneath the veneer of success or contentment is the injured self, the hidden despair, the feelings of loneliness and isolation, the fear of abandonment and rejection, the tears and the rage.

For many of these women, the root of their injury stems from a damaged relation with the father. They may have been wounded by a bad relation to their personal father, or wounded by the patriarchal society which itself functions like a poor father, culturally devaluing the worth of women. In either case, their self-image, their feminine identity, their relation to masculinity, and their functioning in the world is frequently damaged. I would like to take the example of four women, each with a different relation to her father, each with a different lifestyle. What they have in common is inadequate fathering and a resulting way of life that obstructed their ability to form relationships and their capacity to work and to live creatively.

Chris was a successful businesswoman in her late thirties. The oldest of three daughters, she had been a hard-working, straight-A student in school. Upon graduation from college, she found a good job with a thriving company. She put so much effort into her work that by the time she was thirty Chris had risen to a top managerial position. About that time she began to experience tension headaches, insomnia, and complained of continual exhaustion. Like Atlas, she seemed to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders, and soon she became despondent and depressed. She had a series of affairs with married men whom she met in different professional contexts, but she could not seem to find a meaningful relationship. And Chris was beginning to long for a baby. She began to feel hopeless about the future, for her life had come to be merely a continual series of work obligations with no relief in sight. In her dreams were images of children who were either injured or dying. By the time Chris came into therapy, she felt trapped by a compulsion to be perfect in her work and by an inability to let go and enjoy life. She remembered her childhood as unhappy. Her parents had wanted a son, not a daughter, and her father especially expected great things from his children. If they were not the first in their class, the children soon learned they would receive disapproval from their father. To please her father, Chris had worked hard. Instead of playing with her friends, she studied and eventually went into her father’s profession. Since Chris was the oldest, her father seemed to expect more of her. And when she did well, he rewarded her by taking her to his office and spending time with her there. When she reached adolescence, he was very strict, seldom allowing her to date and criticizing her few boyfriends. Her mother accepted the father’s authority, completely seconding all his decisions.

In reality, Chris was living her father’s life and not her own. Though she had rebelled against some of her father’s values by having sexual affairs and smoking pot, in essentials she was still trying to live up to his ideal of hard work and achievement. In effect, she was still living the life her father’s “son” might have led. Realizing this in the course of therapy, Chris was gradually able to let go of her compulsive perfectionism. She began to explore her own interests and started writing short stories, an activity which her father criticized as “impractical” and “indulgent.” She began to meet new people, and although she still had to struggle with her tendency to be perfectionistic, she began to feel energetic and hopeful about life. For Chris to differentiate herself from her father’s expectations is an ongoing process, but the more she does so, the more her own natural path continues to emerge.

A different pattern resulting from an impaired relation to the father is illustrated by the case of Barbara. When I first met her, Barbara was a student who wanted to enter graduate school. She was in her late twenties, twice divorced, with a string of abortions, a history of drug abuse, a weight problem, and a poor relation to money. Although bright and talented, her ability to work and discipline herself to study was undeveloped. Every semester, instead of finishing her course requirements, she asked her teachers for an “incomplete” grade. Soon her bill for analysis had run up to several hundred unpaid dollars. Feeling guilty about the debts and incompletes, she suffered a series of severe anxiety attacks.

Barbara had had no model for self-discipline or success. Her father had been away in wartime when she was a young child. Later, he moved from job to job and gambled, never able to settle down into anything permanent. Her mother was pessimistic and depressed and told Barbara that if she didn’t succeed in marriage the first time, she would never succeed. With this combination—an unreliable father and a depressed, pessimistic mother—Barbara had no adult model for success. Her dreams were frightening. Pathologically murderous men were trying to kill or cripple passive young girls. Sometimes she herself was the victim. With her loose and unstructured lifestyle, Barbara was repeating her father’s pattern. She was also fulfilling her mother’s negative projections that a woman could not succeed.

Once Barbara became aware that she was repeating her father’s pattern and her mother’s projection of failure, she began the slow and gradual process of separating herself from these patterns and finding her own path. First she learned to manage money, paid off her analytic fees, and even was able to save a sizeable amount for her future studies. To do this required giving up the drug that was eating up so much money. Eventually she was able to do her school work on schedule and wrote an outstanding dissertation. And, finally, she learned to control her eating patterns and lost twenty-five pounds. These achievements gave her a sense of her own power and the ability to accomplish what she wanted. In the course of this process the images of men and her father began to change. From destructive, murderous images, they changed to men who were helping the women figures in her dreams. In one dream her father gave her an expensive, elaborately embroidered robe, a tribute to the strength of her emerging feminine image.

Quite often women who have had easy-going, indulgent fathers who were not successful in the world will compensate for the father’s lack by trying to succeed for him. Susan’s father loved her very much. The two reveled in their relationship, which was playful, teasing, and flirtatious. The father put more energy into the relationship with his daughter than into the relationship with his wife. Susan’s mother was a very ambitious woman who had expected great worldly achievements from her husband. That he was a simple man who enjoyed life so much that he was not at the top of his profession disappointed her deeply. Susan unconsciously had picked up this disapproval from her mother and compensated by becoming exacting and perfectionistic herself. Her father, who was dominated by his wife, did not actively oppose his wife’s ambitious expectations for the daughter, and so Susan lived out her mother’s unlived ambitions. Caught by her mother’s ambitious, controlling, perfectionistic attitude, Susan lost her relationship to her relaxed, easy-going, child-like side. The resulting tension brought her neck and back strain during the day, insomnia and teeth grinding at night. No matter what she did, it was never good enough. Although Susan loved her father, she feared that men were weak and incapable. Like her mother, Susan wanted a man who was ambitious and a highly successful moneymaker, but she was attracted to fun-loving men like her father, who in the end proved to be too unreliable for a committed relationship. Just as nothing she did was good enough, neither were her lovers able to satisfy her perfectionistic standards. Now in her forties, she remained unmarried. She also attempted to control things in the areas of work and relationships, with a resulting depression and boredom. Resenting the joylessness of her life, she was taken over by a martyred attitude of hopelessness. At the same time she began to feel she couldn’t meet one more commitment in her professional life, that she would collapse under all those demands. Her dreams, however, brought up some positive images that showed another approach. In one dream, after she had chosen the hardest and fastest way to get where she was going, a voice told her to slow down and take an easier path, assuring Susan she would get there in her own good time. In other dreams she found herself floating peacefully down a river.

Susan began to realize that much of her push, drive, and urge to control belonged to her mother rather than herself. She also became aware that the depression she felt when she did not succeed was much like the depression her father fell into when criticized by his wife. She also saw that in many ways she had acted the role of her father’s “lover,” and that this cut her off from relationships with other men. Consciously, she began to counter the inner voice that critically judged herself and others. She became more open to men and tried to know them without judging them first. Eventually she met a warm, affectionate man, but for some time she was tempted to end the relationship because he wasn’t earning as much money as she thought he should. When she was able to recognize these criticisms as part of her mother’s voice, Susan was able to allow the relationship to live.

In this case the mother was the more dominant figure; the father’s negligence consisted of not opposing the mother’s compulsive ambitions. In a way, he loved his daughter “too much” and so kept her tied to him. Susan needed to recognize this to break the tight bind to her father and to see the effects of her mother’s influence.

Sometimes, as in the case of Mary, a daughter rebels against an overly authoritarian and rigid father. Her father was in the military and required military performance even from his children. Mary, whose temperament was friendly and spontaneous, rebelled against her father’s authoritarian attitude. As a teenager she took LSD and ran around with a fast crowd. Although she had artistic talent, Mary let it slide and then quit college in her sophomore year. Despite her father’s authoritarian and perfectionistic tendencies, he had a chronic disease which forced him to show vulnerability and weakness. Since he never admitted his vulnerability Mary experienced her father as though he were two different people—the strong, authoritarian judge, and the weak, sick man. The men in her dreams also appeared in these opposing ways. There were men with tiny phalluses who were impotent, and there were violent men trying to stab and kill her. Mary felt that the impotent men symbolized her tremendous lack of self-confidence, and that the violent, attacking men were the voice of self-depreciation. Mary’s mother was much like herself, a warm, outgoing woman, but she did not oppose her husband, Since Mary had a good relationship with her mother, she first turned to an older woman for support. But in this relationship she tended to play the role of pleasing daughter, while the older woman often criticized her in an authoritarian manner similar to that of Mary’s father. In the course of analysis she began to gain confidence in herself and recognized the double pattern of rebelling against the authority of the father, yet submitting to it by pleasing the older authoritarian woman. Eventually she was able to assert herself in relation to her older woman friend. Then as the threatening men and the impotent men began to disappear from her dreams, she began a relationship with an emotionally mature man whom she later married. She now had enough confidence in herself to accept the challenge of returning to her love of art and began to study a career in this field. With her new-found strength she was even able to have a meaningful talk with her father, who, in a moment of crisis due to his illness, acknowledged his vulnerability. This enabled a closer emotional relationship between father and daughter.

These are only four examples of wounded women who have suffered from injured relationships with their fathers. There are many variations on this theme. The following dream reveals the general psychological situation of a wounded woman who suffers from an impaired relation to the father.

I am a young girl trapped in a cage holding my baby. Outside is my father riding freely on a horse over green pastures. I long to reach him and try to get out of the cage, sobbing deeply. But the cage topples over. I am not sure whether my baby and I will be crushed by the cage or whether we will be free.

This dream images the separation between father and daughter and the imprisonment of the daughter and her creative potentialities. There is the longing to reach the free energy of the father. But the daughter must first get out of the cage, and this requires a risk. She and her baby may be crushed in the process, or they also may go free. While this is the dream of only one woman, I believe it portrays dramatically the way many other women have been imprisoned by a poor relation to the father, alienating them from a positive relation to fathering in themselves.

On the personal level, there are many ways the father-daughter wound can occur. The father may have been extremely weak and a cause of shame for his daughter; for example, a man who can’t hold a job or who drinks or gambles, etc. Or he may be an “absent father,” having left home by choice as does the man who “loves ’em and leaves ’em.” The absence may also be due to death, war, divorce, or illness—each of which separates the father from his family. Still another way a father can wound a daughter is to indulge her so much that she has no sense of limit, values, and authority. He may even unconsciously fall in love with her and thus keep her bound to him in this way. Or he may look down upon and devalue the feminine because his own inner feminine side has been sacrificed to the ideals of macho-masculine power and authority. He may be a hard worker, successful in his profession, but passive at home and not really actively involved with his daughter, i.e., a detached father. Whatever the case may be, if the father is not there for his daughter in a committed and responsible way, encouraging the development of her intellectual, professional, and spiritual side and valuing the uniqueness of her femininity, there results an injury to the daughter’s feminine spirit.

“The Feminine” is an expression that is currently being re-discovered and re-described anew by women out of their own experiences. Women have begun to realize that men have been defining femininity through their conscious and culturally conditioned expectations of women’s roles and through their unconscious projections on women. In contrast to the notion of femininity defined from a cultural or biological role, my approach is to see “the feminine” symbolically as a way of being, as an inherent principle of human existence. In my experience the feminine reveals itself primarily via images and emotional responses and I draw upon these in the course of this book.¹

The father-daughter wound is not only an event happening in the lives of individual women. It is a condition of our culture as well.² Whenever there is a patriarchal authoritarian attitude which devalues the feminine by reducing it to a number of roles or qualities which come, not from woman’s own experience, but from an abstract view of her—there one finds the collective father overpowering the daughter, not allowing her to grow creatively from her own essence.

Whether the father-daughter wound occurs on the personal level or the cultural level, or both, it is a major issue for most women today. Some women try to avoid dealing with it by blaming their fathers and/or men in general. Others may try to avoid it by denying there is a problem and living out the traditionally accepted feminine roles. But both these routes result in giving up responsibility for their own transformation, the one via blame, the other via adaptation. I believe the real task for women’s transformation these days is to discover for themselves who they are. But part of this discovery entails a dialogue with their history, with the developmental influences that have affected them personally, culturally, and spiritually.

As a daughter grows up, her emotional and spiritual growth is deeply affected by her relationship to her father. He is the first masculine figure in her life and is a prime shaper of the way she relates to the masculine side of herself and ultimately to men. Since he is “other,” i.e., different from herself and her mother, he also shapes her differentness, her uniqueness and individuality. The way he relates to her femininity will affect the way she grows into womanhood. One of his roles is to lead the daughter from the protected realm of the mother and the home into the outside world, helping her to cope with the world and its conflicts. His attitude toward work and success will color his daughter’s attitude. If he is confident and successful, this will be communicated to his daughter. But if he is afraid and unsuccessful, she is likely to take over this fearful attitude. Traditionally, the father also projects ideals for his daughter. He provides a model for authority, responsibility, decision-making, objectivity, order, and discipline. When she is old enough, he steps back so she may internalize these ideals and actualize them in herself. If his own relation to these areas is either too rigid or too indulgent, that will affect his daughter’s r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: A Wounded Daughter
• Part I: The Wounding
• Part II: The Hurting
• Part III: The Healing
• Notes