Father Hunger: Explorations with Adults and Children

331 Pages·2001·5.85 MB·English

by  James Herzog

FATHER HUNGER
EXPLORATIONS
witli
ADUlTS AND CHilDREN
'FATHER '}(uNGER
~XPLORATIONS
with
~.DULTS AND CHILDREN
James M. Herzog
~ THE ANALYTIC PRESS
2001 Hillsdale, Nj London
Copyright© 2001 by The Analytic Press, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form: by
photostat, microform, electronic retrieval system, or any other means, without
the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by The Analytic Press, Inc.
101 West Street, Hillsdale, NJ 07642
www.analyticpress.com
Typeset in Adobe Sabon by CompuDesign, Charlottesville, VA
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Herzog, James M., 1943-
Father hunger: explorations with adults and children I James Herzog.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-88163-259-7
1. Father and child. 2. Psychoanalysis. I. Title.
BF723.F35 H47 2001 150.19'5-dc21
2001033496
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK MY PARENTS, Henry James Herzog and
Hilde Salomonski Herzog, for their initial and shaping contribution;
my children, Noah Alexander and Eve Elana, for their reflecting,
enduring, and enabling roles; my friend Mark E. O'Connell for our
playing, working, and thinking together; and my wife, Eleanor White
Herzog, for everything. Leni is everything to me.
John Kerr from The Analytic Press was more than an editor. His
role in helping this book to achieve its present status is immense.
Eleanor Starke Kobrin copy edited the manuscript with grace, ele
gance, and precision. Steven Cooper, Alison Potter O'Connell, Elliot
and Barbara Schildkrout, Lora Heims Tessman and Arnold Modell,
Steve and Gridth Ablon, Chris and Jill Lovett, Bob Muellner, Fred
Meisel, George W. Goethals, John Nemiah, Julius Richmond, Herb
Goldings, Paul Myerson, Joe Nemetz, Helen Tartakoff, Sam Kaplan,
Tony Kris, and many other colleagues, teachers, and friends at
Harvard, BPSI, and in Boston also made invaluable contributions.
Arthur Valenstein deserves special mention in this reJard. In New
York, John Munder Ross, Susan Coates, Judith Kestenberg, Eleanor
Galenson, and Martin Bergmann were and are pivotal helpers and
influences. Rosemarie Berna in Zurich and Lotte Kohler in Munich
also belong on this list.
Because this book is about development of the self in the family,
it seems more than appropriate also to mention my wife Leni's par
ents, Harmon S. B. and Ruth N. White. Their role in our lives and in I
our children's lives has been very great and their support of this proj-
ect of equal magnitude.
I thank all of you very much.
v
CONTENTS
Preface ix
1 Introduction 1
2 Michael: No Face 4
3 Father Hunger and Children's Dreams 20
4 Michael: The Strange Nurse Dream 36
5 Fathering Daughters and Fathering Sons 44
6 Bart and the Killer Walrus 55
7 Michael: Doing It 65
8 Michael: Looking for Father 78
9 Ali: The Mother Tongue 93
10 Ali: Opa and the Man Goose 104
11 The T Family 123
12 Dr. C: Trauma and Character 140
13 Etta: Something Is Happening 154
14 Natalia and the Bacon Factory 165
15 Expectant Fatherhood 181
I
ri;
l
VIII CONTENTS
16 Tommy and the Black Lion 197
17 How Do Men Get into One Another? 237
18 Boys Who Make Babies 254
19 Jonah: Someone Is Being Beaten 264
20 Afterword 308
References 313
Index 317
PREFACE
MY MOTHER'S FATHER, MARTIN SALOMONSKI, was a liberal rabbi in
Berlin. In 1943, he was sent to Theresienstadt together with his son,
Dolph, and youngest daughter, Ruth, who had remained in Germany
with him. Later that year, when Dolph, then 14, was told that he
would be transported to Auschwitz, my grandfather, who did not
have to go, would not let him go alone. He accompanied his son and
subsequently, like countless others, was lost. I never knew my grand
father, and the horror of his particular circumstances and of the
Holocaust generally defy comparison, but the identification with him
is strong. To accompany, even in terror; to refuse to extract myself,
even at a cost; and to try to help so that a person who requests my
assistance, and with whom I have forged an alliance, need not do it
alone-has been my guiding and abiding principle. To extend the his
torical antecedent: that one may be endangered in such a journey is
always a possibility; that both people survive and that the patient
knows himself better is always the goal. Toward this aim of "full
deck" (Herzog and O'Connell, submitted) functioning for the patient
and the continued capacity of the analyst to work, love, and play,
my work is directed and this book is brought forth. In all these ways
I hope to honor the memory of Martin Salomonski.
1 INTRODUCTION
INFORMATION OBTAINED IN THE ANALYTIC SETIING is different from
that emanating from biography, autobiography, random sampling,
structured interviews, philosophical contemplation, or other modes
of data collection. It seems to bear a stronger resemblance to actual
developmental processes than to scientific pursuits in that absolute
truth is less an ultimate goal than is the making of meaning and the
finding of sense in what has transpired and in what is occurring and
recurring. Continuity as a principle of the ongoing life of the mind
pulls for the construction of causal sequences and meaningful pat
ternings. The veridicality of these constructions may be limited to
the conceptual framework in which they are devised and divined.
Practitioners from other disciplines have cautioned about the gen
eralizability of data from the analytic situation and stressed the par
ticularities and limitations of insights and conclusions drawn from
such a setting. Their caveats are well taken but need not result in the
exclusion of analytic data from the palette of information available
to theoreticians or students of human development or behavior.
Rather the special significance of psychoanalytic data is in what I
have called "the domain of personal meaning," the construction of
reality that features both conscious and unconscious process, thought,
and fantasy and is to be distinguished from data bases I have called
the level of videotaped reality and the level of interrogative reality.
By videotaped reality, I mean data the camera can see and record.
Currently, much is being learned by filming mother-infant interac
tion, father-child interactions, and actual therapeutic encounters.
1
One sees what is happening. Interrogative reality refers to direct ques-
tioning of a child, his parents, or any individual. This approach yields
consciously considered material thought to be appropriate in response
1
CHAPTER 1
to the query in a particular circumstance. As has been noted by Mary
Main (2000; Hesse and Main, 2000) and others (e.g., Slade, 2000),
this level of inquiry can also yield data about underlying neuropsy
chological linguistic strategies of cognition and affect tolerance that
are highly correlated with an individual's attachment history.
In this book, I use primarily psychoanalytic information, with
all its robustness and all its fragility. Each individual whose story
unfolds in conversation with the analyst illustrates the ways in which
the unraveling and reconstruction of the past as it is encountered in
the present allows for a coconstructed version of individual devel
opment and derailment and for a fresh perspective on what is entailed
in restitution and even in repair. I call the intermediate space that
analyst and analysand create together the Spielraum, or play space;
what is unique to this setting is a collaborative finding of ways in
which two people can play, albeit asymmetrically, in a manner that
is safe enough and contained enough that the most profound per
sonal pain and conflict is assured admission and respectful regard.
The fresh perspective on the self and its history is unique to the
analytic setting and to the opportunity for new play that arises out
of a kind of interplay that features not only replay but also an exam
ination of how and why the replay has occurred.
I am always trying to explore the ways in which the self, espe
cially the masculine self, develops as a self-seeking entity using same
ness and difference as a way of harnessing, knowing, and owning his
own attributes, both facultative and problematic. I try to show that
the boy self is concerned with learning how to do it, as well as mas
tering the concomitant tasks of being, doing, bearing, working on,
working with, working out, and working though. How these processes
are reencountered, recapitulated, and reinvented in the analytic set
ting is a continued focus. My emphasis on the masculine self grows
out of several decades of research on the role of the father in child
development. This focus has multiple determinants, not the least of
which is autobiographical.
The self, as it is constructed of accrued experience and subse
quent representation of self with father, with mother, and with father
and mother together, is, optimally, a self endowed with multiple play
mode options and resiliency in the face of overwhelming or under
whelming environmental input. Such a self has a greater capacity to
"roll with the punches" and thus a greater capacity both to manage