A LONELY four-mat hut- All day no one in sight. Alone, sitting beneath the window, Only the continual sound of falling leaves. [1] During the Covid-19 pandemic, for the first time it seems to me, I have seen in UK media, significant reporting on loneliness and the mental health impact […]
In Part 1 of this blog I outlined some psychoanalytic ideas about the contribution a father makes to his daughter’s development. Here I am going to outline some of the research I have gathered on the impacts of father absence for children generally, and then specifically for a daughter. From […]
The history of psychoanalysis begins with Freud (1856-1939) considering the role and importance of a father in the gender and sexual identity development of children. However, later analysts and writers such as Melanie Klein (1892-1960) and Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) focused on the role and significance of the mother for the […]
The Absent Father From a psychoanalytic perspective, Freud (1856-1939) thought that the father played an important role in the early phases of child development, the latter especially for boys in the development of a gender and sexual identity (Jones 2007, p.44). Despite this, in classical psychoanalytic theory which assumed the […]
A while ago now I mentioned to an acquaintance – a woman in her 40’s – I was researching the topic of absent fathers for my Masters Dissertation topic. She said she would describe her father as absent even though she had known him growing up – before and after […]
The other day I noticed an advert on the London Underground for a herbal medicine. The advert said something like: 1 in 5 people experience or suffer from anxiety. “Really? Only 1 in 5?” I thought. Leaving aside the big, and perhaps impossible, area of cure, I decided I would write something […]
I have recently taken up a particular sitting meditation practice using ‘mala beads’ and a silent mantra. Mala beads are small wooden cedar beads, interspersed with a few glass beads, strung together and finished with a bead cluster and tassel. There are 108 beads on each string. With the eyes […]
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