Main description:

Builds on psychological narratives and focuses on several main themes, including feelings of insecurity and failure, body issues, negative personality traits and alienation, giving the reader an understanding of the variety of ways in which absent and inadequate fathers affect their daughters.

Includes clinical material from the author's own work as well as that of psychoanalysts such as Andre Green ensuring that the book is grounded in both interdisciplinary theory and practice.

Schwartz also discusses the poetry of Sylvia Plath, fairytales, and Jung's silence about his own daughters highlighting literary parallels to psychology and elucidating Jungian concepts.

Contents:

Acknowledgements Credits Introduction 1. The Parallax 2. Loss and Longing 3. Father Desire, Father Wounds 4. Mirroring in the Dead Father Effect 5. Bad Dad - Negative Father Complex 6. Father Archetypal Dynamics, Symbols and Images 7. Who Is She Really? The 'As-If' Personality 8. The Dialogue of Therapy 9. If He Loves Her, Where Is He? 10. Idealisation of Father - A Tomb of Illusion 11. Do You Want to be 'Daddy's Girl'? 12. Behind the Mask and the Glitter - A Narcissistic Response 13. The Body in Shadow 14. Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' 15. Filling the Absence Index