An Instance of Emotional Absence of a Father Traumatized by War–Clinical Material and Musical Illustration

Introduction

Of all the imagos of a childhood which, as a rule, is no longer remembered, none is more important for a youth or a man than that of his father. Organic necessity introduces into a man’s relation to his father an emotional ambivalence which we have found most strikingly expressed in the Greek myth of King Oedipus. A little boy is bound to love and admire his father, who seems to him the most powerful, the kindest and the wisest creature in the world. God himself is after all only an exaltation of this picture of a father as he is represented in the mind of early childhood. But soon the other side of this emotional relationship emerges. One’s father is recognized as the paramount disturber of one’s instinctual life; he becomes a model not only to imitate but also to get rid of, in order to take his place. Thenceforward affectionate and hostile impulses towards him persist side by side, often to the end of one’s life, without either of them being able to do away with the other. It is in this existence of contrary feelings side by side that lies the essential character of what we call emotional ambivalence. In the second half of childhood a change sets in in the boy’s relation to his father - a change whose importance cannot be exaggerated. From his nursery the boy begins to cast his eyes upon the world outside. And he cannot fail now to make discoveries which undermine his original high opinion of his father and which expedite his detachment from his first ideal. He finds that his father is no longer the mightiest, wisest and richest of beings; he grows dissatisfied with him, he learns to criticize him and to estimate his place in society; and then, as a rule, he makes him pay heavily for the disappointment that has been caused by him. Everything that is hopeful, as well as everything that is unwelcome, in the new generation is determined by this detachment from the father (Freud, 1914, p. 243).

The theme of the boy’s ambivalence towards the imago of the father, as explored in this extract, is not foreign to psychoanalytic literature. Freud refers to the boy’s disappointment and ambivalence once he realizes his father is not the omnipotent figure he had thought him to be. Such a disappointment is a conscious event. It has, of course, a positive developmental aspect as it leads, amongst other things, to the development of the boy’s ability to further separate from his original objects of identification and seek his place in the world. Interestingly enough, it is an aspect Freud does not expand upon in this short piece of writing.

In this essay, I would like to further develop the unconscious aspect of that disappointment and ambivalence. I will explore that aspect both in the context of Freud’s own writing and biography as well as illustrate it through a clinical vignette. I will use the term unconscious in the sense suggested recently by Ogden. “When we use the term unconscious, we are referring to an aspect of mind operating outside of one’s awareness that coexists with an aspect of mind in which we are aware of our thoughts and feelings” (Ogden, 2013, p. 22).

I suggest that the sense of ambivalence of the maturing boy can be related not only to conscious aspects of the Oedipal Complex, as Freud suggested, but also to the father’s own disposition and to the unconscious aspects of their relationship. Without attempting to make a universal claim, as Freud (1914) did, I would suggest that it is possible at times to examine the boy’s ambivalence as an emotional response to some failure by the father to maintain the loving stance he held towards the boy in the past. That failure is not necessarily a result of the father deliberately distancing himself from the boy, but is quite often a result of some event, external or internal, that emotionally over-engages the father, rendering him emotionally absent to the boy. That emotional absence remains mysterious to the boy and becomes a source of disappointment, once realizing that the loving father of his preadolescence has changed and become preoccupied and distant.

This emotional absence is different from a physical absence of the father because of death or parental dispute. In such a case, the strain the absence places upon the development of the child is obvious. In this paper, I will focus upon the metaphoric absence of the father due to some emotional strain. Still, the two instances are related. To demonstrate the similarity, I refer to Freud’s (1915) seminal paper Mourning and Melancholy, which was written during the same years as the paper concerning the father imago, indicating, perhaps, Freud’s preoccupation with his own father’s death, and thus allowing us to link the two thematically. In short, Mourning and Melancholy draws a parallel between the clinical descriptions of mourning as an actual loss and of depressions. Though the two states share many phenomenological aspects, they differ crucially on one significant point. In the case of depression, the individual also suffers from a low self-image, indicating that he has turned his unexplored ambivalence towards the departed object inwardly, and thus causes himself self-image injury.

I suggest that in the case of the emotionally absent father, the boy experiences the absence as having something to do with his own, developmentally natural, wish to distance himself from the father. However, if the father remains emotionally available to the boy, the boy is then able to reposition himself in relation to his beloved father without fearing retaliation. In this state of affairs the boy’s individuation is dealt with successfully enough both to allow the boy a sense of autonomy and the separation he needs for his emotional development and to maintain a good-enough relationship between the father and son.

However, if the father is not consistently and repeatedly emotionally available and attentive to the boy’s needs, he (the father) will be experienced as emotionally absent or even “dead”. The father imago will be internalized as “a bad object,” in the sense that Guntrip (1974) expounded when he described internalized objects as a result of not good-enough external object relationships:

If that is the case, the boy will be left with a reduced sense of containment for his ambivalent feelings. He will have less access to the actual object through which he is able to transform his ambivalent feelings, which will be turned inwardly. As Guntrip (1974) suggested, this bad object will be projected as it cannot be digested and it remains a foreign object that needs to be evacuated. This bad object can take the shape of a symptom, may impact the boy’s superego or, it is hoped, be given some creative sublimated expression. It is this last option which I wish to explore further.

I suggest that some adolescents’ interests in particular pieces of literature and music during can be attributed to sublimation. In such a case, a careful interpretation of that specific piece of music or writing can contribute greatly towards the understanding of the boy’s inner world. Such an interpretation based upon conventional cultural criticism would not be sufficient as it would reduce the discussed work to its objective elements. I suggest that a different reading is needed. Such a reading is portrayed by Ogden (2013).

In The Analyst’s Ear and the Critic’s Eye (2013), psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden and his son, literary critic Benjamin Ogden, joined forces to suggest a psychoanalytical reading of literature that draws from both disciplines without subjugating either. In other words they suggest not turning the psychoanalytic method into an objective, know-it-all method and a piece of art into a subject that can be analyzed to death. They both suggest that language is not only a means of communication but also an essential part of the process by which we form ourselves, and that this process goes on for as long as we live. “Language is not simply a medium for the expression of the self; it is integral to the creation of the self (which is a continuing, moment-to-moment process” (Ogden & Ogden, 2013, p. 9).

Being a process which accompanies us, the process of relating to pieces of art, music and literature, is a part of the way in which we enrich our lives, imbuing those works with life so that we can feel nourished by them. “… we must add something to what we hear, and in that way transform it. Otherwise, we are simply making echoes and not offering original response” (Ogden, 2013, p. 19).

The work we do with pieces of culture we identify with, as my patient Assaff did as a boy with the rock opera Tommy, is comparable to the work done with dreams. Dreams are not simply clues to what individuals have repressed but contribute to the way the psyche is formed. As I will show later, the way Assaff related to the text and music of Tommy was similar to the way one deals with dreams. In both instances, the opera’s music and text, and dreams served him both as sources of inspiration and solace and formed part of his maturational process.

In this case what allows the comparison between the relationship with dreams and the relationship with pieces of culture is the assertion that in both cases individuals can rely upon the unconscious communication to enrich our lives. For example, one can engage in symbolic interpretation of a dream and find its relevance to the dreamer’s life; one can also explore the way in which the actual dreaming of the dream contributes to the dreamer’s life (Spero, 2010). In a similar way, one can interpret the way a piece of text influences the reader’s conscious mind, and one can also explore the way the process of reading or listening to music builds up internal space within the reader (Spence, 2003). As this case demonstrates, when Assaff was 13 years old, he both listened to music and dreamt. He was dreaming (in the sense Ogden described) while being wide awake, and the psychic work he was engaged in allowed him both to deal with the sense of emptiness and terror due to his father’s emotional absence and to develop his self around those experiences. He was engaged in a dreaming activity through the music, which saved his life.

There are many personal, familial, and cultural factors involved in the determining of the impact of Assad’s father’s emotional absence, including gender, gender identification, psychosexual stage, age of the child, place in family, and previous relationship with the father vis-a-vis the dependence-separation spectrum (Botèro, 2012; Dick, 2011; Lugar, 2013).

Psychoanalytical literature is bountiful with material regarding the ambivalence a boy develops towards his father (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973). At its center, is the wish to eliminate the father. That wish may coincide with an actual disappearance or an internal one, as in the case of emotional absence. If that emotional withdrawal happens, it is possible to view the damage caused to the father imago as a result of the fulfillment of the ambivalent wish as tragic. The proverb “be careful of what you wish for” resonates here. The boy’s experience of the emotional absence of his father is tragically attributed to his own ambivalence. The boy is unable to see that the change his father underwent was due to external circumstances. The ensuing guilt created a gaping hole in the boy’s psyche. In this case report, it was the boy’s ability to find solace in an artistic object as a container for his unconscious drama that allowed him to stay in relatively good-health and prevented an emotional breakdown. The boy was able to seek an alternative based upon the unexpressed wish for his father’s survival and the reassurance it would bring of the world as a safe holding environment for his (the boy’s) libidinal activities.

And yet, it is important not to underplay the power of the ambivalent wish and the impact its fulfillment may create. If at first there seems to be a complementary integration between wishing to overcome the father and wishing his survival, one need only to refer to Freud’s (1939) acknowledgement that aggression was not the only feature of the father and son relationship. In Moses and Monotheism he acknowledged that even cannibalism might have a holding function; “… not only hated and feared their father but also honoured him as a model … wished to take his place in reality. We can, if so, understand the cannibalistic as an attempt to ensure identification with him by incorporating a piece of him” (Freud, 1939, p. 82).

How does one reconcile between the aspect of the son-father relationship where the father is devoured and the aspect of the son-father relationship where the boys needs to place the father, time and time again, in a position where he is available to him? How does the boy reconcile the dueling aspects of the father-son relationship? In one aspect the father is devoured by the son and in the other the father is positioned so that he is available to the son. One way of thinking about this almost impossible integration is provided by D.W. Winnicott (1963) who described a dream he had that clarified for him how aggression was contained and dealt with in the inner theatre of the mind. His dream was in three parts. In the first one he was in the world being destroyed, in the second part he was the one doing the destroying, and in the third part something else happened.

In Winnicott’s language, the boy’s ability to integrate those contrasting aspects and to survive such powerful forces of destruction, allows him to repair his injured father imago and continue with the developmental task of continuously relocating himself in relation to his internal objects. Thus, the path towards growth and creative self-articulation is more stable. This path has to go through the psychic effort contained in the dream-work. Thus dream work is not only a way of making conscious unconscious material, but also a way of building up psychic reality (Spero, 2010).

The Case of Assaff

One nodal point I would like to focus upon was the impact of the traumatic event Assaff’s father suffered during his military service when the boy was 12. The event affected the father’s emotional capability, rendering him emotionally absent to his son, leaving what Assaff later described as “a gaping hole” in his sense of well-being. That sense of absence was in many ways incomprehensible to him. His difficulty processing the absence is understandable considering it was never spoken about in the household. The boy was left with a terrible sense of loss even though his father was physically present, seemingly healthy, and functional after having returned from military service duties, which had lasted only three weeks.

During the course of his therapy, Assaff recollected that the only thing that helped him somewhat to cope with the sense of bewilderment he experienced because of the change his father underwent, was a particular piece of music he listened to almost obsessively during and since that time. That piece of music was The Who’s Tommy, a rock opera written during the 70s.

Assaff was 34 years old when he presented for psychotherapy. After ending a painful relationship with a woman with whom he had lived for four years. Though he was the instigator of their break-up and at first felt relieved to be on his own again, several weeks after he began experiencing sleep loss, poor concentration at work, moodiness, and irritability. He explained that he felt as if he was grieving over a beloved person without knowing who it was. He was, in his own words, “experiencing bereavement without anyone actually dying around me!”

Despite his depressive symptoms, he appeared eager to engage fully in understanding what was happening with him. He brought recollections of dreams to therapy, and his associations were abundant. My initial liking of him deepened, and I experienced myself in the transference as a loving father, appreciating the emergence of his personality. At times I felt slightly concerned, as a father would, when he reported episodes of deep despair that he dealt with either by staying home, smoking a joint, and listening to music until he fell asleep, or by going out and meeting a friend. These recurring but very short spells of despair, never lasting more than a few hours at a time, did not appear during our weekly sessions. I began to wonder how he was able to split-off that aspect of himself and hide it from me.

The therapy was ongoing for several months when the Jewish holiday period approached. It meant that we would miss three sessions. Our efforts to find alternative dates were to no avail as we were both travelling abroad during the holidays. I noticed from his manner that he seemed to be dealing with some disappointment when we were discussing this alternate dates, but he rebuked my efforts to put it out in the open. His charming smile literally dazzled me into silence. I realized he was not yet ready to discuss those aspects of the therapeutic relationship. I attributed his reluctance to the early stage of therapy but made a mental note of what seemed to me a manic defense against feelings of separation and loss.

When we returned from our respective holidays, Assaff seemed more anxious. While on holiday abroad, he met a young woman with whom he started an intense affair. The affair continued after they returned but seemed to fill Assaff with anxiety lest he will again find himself “stuck” in a relationship he did not really want.

Towards the end of the session, after a silence that lasted longer than usual, I noticed that he was humming quietly to himself. It was almost indiscernible but loud enough so that I could hear it without being able to recognize the tune. I let it pass that time and again made a mental note to myself. It felt as if Assaff, in response to something that had been going on, was creating a private space within himself and within the process. I remained in the dark, and felt excluded from a part of the process, which impressed me as significant.

During the following session, the humming returned. I maintained my position of not commenting on it, but recognized that my abstinence was building up tension within me. It felt somewhat disproportionate to the event, and I wondered what was the underlying unconscious communication being acted out between us. I noticed that my preoccupation with the significance of the humming was interfering with my ability to pay close attention to Assaff when he spoke. I felt myself withdrawing from him and becoming somewhat absent as a retaliatory response to the distance he created from me as he hummed.

The two sessions during which he hummed centered on his dissatisfaction with the prolonged holiday affair. He related his reluctance to end it to unfinished business with the relationship that had brought him into therapy initially. After some time he paused, hummed, fell into silence and then commenced to tell me about a dream. In his dream he was watching over his younger brother while his parents were going out. His father was dressed in clothes that seemed inappropriate, and he was unshaven and seemed distracted. His mother seemed oblivious. He watched them as they went out the door and when he looked back at his young sister, she was gone. The crib in which she had been was empty. At that point Assaff woke up. He said that he felt no fear, though he knew he should have. Silence followed, and before I had a chance to say anything, he began humming. This time the humming was slightly louder and I could tell what tune it was. Assaff noticed my interest and asked with a smile if I recognized the tune.

I replied that it sounded familiar. I then repeated the title of what I thought I heard him hum: “It’s a Boy, Mrs. Walker, it’s a Boy! It’s a Boy, Mrs. Walker, it’s a Boy!”

Assaff glowed in response to my recognition. He did not expect me to know that piece of music. It was a moment of closeness and understanding in the process that symbolized the therapeutic alliance that had formed between us. It prompted Assaff to tell me in detail the story about the album, Tommy.

Tommy-The Story

Tommy as a Transitional Object

Assaff was 10 years old when his father was called to service in the 1980s. Until that moment the family’s life in Tel Aviv could be characterized as comfortable. Both parents worked, Assaff was doing well at school, and they led a middle class way of life. Assaff was the second child of three children, he had “a sister on either side.” His parents were loving toward the children and each another. Assaff shared his father’s interest in football and went to Saturday matches with him. When Assaff’s father was a young man, he dreamt of becoming a professional footballer and showed promise. He played in a professional club but a severe injury, which nearly crippled him at the age of 19, ended those aspirations.

Assaff’s father was called to service on a day that had been intended for playing football together in the park. The memory his father’s return haunted Assaff for years. On the day his father returned from service, Assaff waited for him wearing the same outfit he had worn several weeks previously, holding their football as a welcome-home gift. His father barely smiled. His unshaven cheeks were sunken. He avoided the family and after a few minutes retreated to the bedroom, and slept through the day to the following morning. Assaff and his sisters were shocked, and they could hardly be consoled by their mother. Soon Assaff’s disappointment turned to rage, from which he found relief only with sleep.

Although Assaff’s father seemed much better the following morning and dutifully took his son to play football in the park that afternoon, Assaff was not quite the same. Soon after Assaff lost interest in football, and gradually began to despise it. He would deride anyone who showed interest in the sport. He developed such hatred towards football he once called his father “a moron” for trying to coax him into going to see a match together.

His recent mumbling of Tommy was attuned with Assaff’s manner at that time. At the time of therapy, his father was in deteriorating health and confined to a nursing home. Assaff’s experience of his father was of a weak and fragmented figure. But he was unable to articulate clearly his wish for a more robust and stable father. He used the theme of Tommy to relate to a memory fragment of a boy who had lost his father and as a result lost his own competence in the world, escaping into fantasy.

During the following sessions, we were able to retrace the significance of the few words he hummed, which were the opening lines of the rock opera. The significance of these words, uttered by the midwife who delivered the baby Tommy, remained puzzling for Assaff throughout his life. All he knew was the whenever he began listening to that album, which he did many times, he was seized with a deep sense of loss and longing.

In time it became clearer that the adolescent preoccupation with the music, the lyrics, the narrative, and the cultural background of the fictional character of Tommy may have presented Assaff with an opportunity to register, digest, and work-through the emotional change he had experienced in the relationship with his shell-shocked (but formerly beloved) father. While the music lacked conscious links with his own life experience, he continued to regard it with awe, unable to interpret it and make it his own. It remained a remote object with which he was absorbed and which gave him some degree of emotional and spiritual solace but failed to help him come to terms with the mundane reality of living with a shell-shocked father and a disturbed family.

In time, Assaff began to recollect more memories from that earlier time. Although he was unable to ask his father about that traumatic time, he could speak to his mother about it. She was surprised that it had affected him so strongly. She reminded him that he had come across The Who’s Tommy by chance when they had gone shopping and he found the double album lying in a heap by the grocery store. Assaff added the album to his budding collection and began listening to it. It was only a month or so later that his father was called to duty. Tommy was the soundtrack of those days for Assaff, but he disassociated the memory of the music from the actual events of those months.

Assaff’s memories from those days were scant. He knew that his father’s military unit encountered a group of terrorists on their way to plant a bomb in an Israeli city. His father returned to his normal activities at work and sports, and though he seemed to recover, he was not quite right. Assaff was particularly sensitive to the minute changes in his father’s inner state. Although his father soon returned to taking Assaff to football matches, something was not quite the same as before the military call and never became the same again. Assaff was left with a feeling that his father had become absent in ways he could not even formulate to himself. A gap was created and that gap was filled with The Who’s music. His relationship with the music attempted to bridge the trauma.

The break in the therapy due to the holidays occurred just as Assaff was forming a close attachment to the therapist. This led to a regression and use of the Tommy object as a way of bridging the unspeakable. Listening to the sounds emanating from that gap and interpreting them allowed Assaff to recollect his memories from when his father returned from service. In the following months, Assaff was able to work-through the various aspects of his ambivalence towards his father, and he began to process the period of his father’s emotional absence from which he struggled.

Discussion

Before discussing the clinical vignette that served as the stimulus for this theoretical exercise, I would like to briefly interpret an instance in Freud’s own relationship with his father, Jacob. That incident will help to illustrate the way I interpret essay (Freud, 1914) from which I quoted at the beginning of this paper.

This is not a reductionist attempt to link Freud’s biography with the theoretical framework he outlined in Freud’s article. Rather, it serves as a suggestive illustration of one possible interpretation of the emotional ambivalence Freud refers to in the boy’s attitude towards his father.

The incident is fairly well known. I shall recount it briefly, using Gay’s account (1988) For example, when Freud reached early adolescence he experienced:

I suggest that Freud’s realization that his father was not the omnipotent figure he had thought him to be can be considered in relation to his conceptualization of the father imago. I suggest that his disappointment relates to a minor case of emotional absence of his father due to an external event that preoccupied the father’s awareness to the extent that he was temporarily unavailable for the boy’s projections. Freud viewed his father to be absent not as a result of a physical disappearance, but through his reluctance to stand up to anti-Semitic verbal abuse, which functioned as what Freud the son viewed as a weakness. It is significant in my opinion that the father’s weakness in his son’s eyes was related to his experience as a Jew in a hostile environment. Freud viewed his father as weak and without the glamour of omnipotence he attributed to him earlier, because of his father’s failure to deal successfully with hostile external circumstances. The racial abuse his father tolerated without apt response, created a sense of abandonment in the young Freud. In a sense, one could argue that Freud was left alone in a hostile Gentile environment without the benevolent protection of his father, both as a real presence but even more significantly as an injured and partially absent father imago.

Freud’s father has been described as a warm figure in Freud’s early childhood. One could not easily attribute emotional absence to his figure. The economic hardship the Freud family endured during Sigmund’s early years did not seem to cause too much emotional upset. One can refer to Freud’s letter to Wilhelm Fliess after his father’s death in 1896 to attest his attachment to him as well as sense some unresolved issues. Freud seems to be surprised by his own pain. “By one of those obscure paths beyond official consciousness the death of the old man has affected me profoundly” (Freud, 1960, p. 232). He then makes a surprising statement that goes beyond a description of the illness that caused his father’s death, “His life had been over a long time before he died (Freud, 1960, p. 232).”

I suggest that the “death” referred to was the decline of the father imago Freud had experienced during his early adolescence. The disappointment he experienced from his father’s response to anti-Semitic abuse (and probably other events which remain unreported) would be one instance (perhaps the only one he allowed himself to remember) that might be interpreted as a screen memory. The impact of his father’s death, though anticipated due to his illness, was immense. “I now feel quite uprooted” (Freud, 1960, p. 232).

It is not only his father that has been lost, but Freud’s sense of belonging. The injury to the father imago, which was left unattended, resulted in an injury to his sense of belonging. It was after his father’s death in 1896 that Freud began his famous self-analysis, which laid the foundation for the writing of his most significant work on dreams. The father’s absence motivated Freud to undergo the inner quest, of which psychoanalysis was the fruitful product (Quinadoz, 2005).

Tommy helped the young Assaff to deal with a psychic phenomenon he could not comprehend nor articulate and it became a part of his inner world. In a sense it represented an effort to come to terms with an incomprehensible piece of reality. It was not a conscious effort to use that of piece of music as a defense or as a transitional object, and its significance only became clear during the therapy when it surfaced as a reaction to an event (the therapist’s abscence). Though the absence was seemingly mundane and anticipated, it evoked a deep reaction, as Assaff unconsciously relived an earlier and traumatic experience. That experience contained a disassociated memory of Assaff’s father emotional absence, which had never been properly understood by the boy. It has sunk into near oblivion, wrapped in the music that was significant to Assaff at that time. What brought the memory back into consciousness, thus allowing its working-through in therapy, was the piece of music itself, hummed by Assaff. Once the memory, with its previously disassociated feelings, was relived, Assaff was able to come to terms with aspects of his relationship with his father. The father imago, which had been injured due to the father’s emotional absence, was acknowledged to contain less-than-ideal aspects. This allowed Assaff to let go and continue the delayed process of separation from the beloved father-son paradigm. Consequently, Assaff was able to deal more effectively with the current relationships in his life. He was able to disengage from the ambivalence he had felt towards his father during his adolescence. The “return” of his father to Assaff’s life in later years did not totally overcome the sense of injury. It had remained a painful memory, but thanks to Assaff’s embracing of the The Who’s Tommy, he was able to find a source of solace in his attachment to the music and its associated themes. Those provided him with transitional cultural objects with which he could identify and onto which he was able to transfer his attachment.