This inquiry utilized a qualitative heuristic design and methodology to explore the experience of father hunger in adult men. Data was collected through in-depth interviews with the researcher's father and six other men who were intimately familiar with the emotional experience of father hunger. This data was then amplified with the researcher's own experience of father hunger.
Far from being disposable, as some contemporary voices would have us believe, fathers play a crucial role in the lives of their children. When denied meaningful contact with their fathers, either physically or emotionally, a gaping hole or "father hunger" emerges in the child's psyche, from what it experiences as desertion. If left unfulfilled, this father hunger triggers pronounced psychological patterns consigning that child to personal and professional dead-ends as an adult. Father hunger manifests itself in many forms such as workaholic, substance abuse, chronic depression, sexual promiscuity, violent behavior, food addiction, and an inability to sustain intimate relationships. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Beth Erickson helps readers and therapists identify and pinpoint the causes of father hunger and explore the spiritual crises that unresolved losses such as this generate. Provocative exercises present strategies for resolving these losses and escaping the cycle of anguish. Longing for Dad is a roadmap to a pace of comfort and hope for anyone suffering from physical or emotional father loss and will help new fathers provide their children with a strong foundation for a healthy, well-balanced adulthood.
Well-organized and well-referenced, this book gives a clear presentation of heuristic methodology as a systematic form of qualitative research. Investigators of human experiences will find this book invaluable as a research guide. The author illustrates how heuristic concepts and processes form components of the research design and become the basis for a methodology. There is a clear explanation of how heuristic inquiry works in practice and the actual process of conducting a human science investigation is described in detail.
More than 20 million children live without the presence of their biological fathers. About 57% of African-Americans, 31% of Hispanics, and 20% of Caucasians are foreign to their fathers. Consequently, there is a fatherless factor when facing social ills. It leads to a greater risk of poverty, teen pregnancy, behavioral problems, imprisonment, drop-outs, crimes, abuse and neglect. There is a pattern to prevent these statistics. Where Is My Father? tackles this epidemic by identifying the pattern that God prescribed for fatherhood. Fathers are more than providers and protectors - they prescribe patterns for life. Unfortunately, moms are unable to fill this gap in patternless homes. When dads disconnect, they cause children to suffer on spiritual life-support. This book administers healing by exposing the proper pattern for prosperous, productive and positive lives. Where Is My Father? equally impacts fatherless children, single-mothers, and dads who fail to recognition their power, purpose and pattern.
"With passion and precision, Fatherless America demonstrates that whether our concern is with teenage pregnancy, crime, violence against women, educational failure, or child poverty, no social trend of our generation is more dangerous than fatherlessness. It weakens families, harms children, causes or aggravates our worst social problems, and makes individual adult happiness harder to achieve." "This explosive book goes beyond documenting the effects of fatherlessness on individual families to show how the very ideal of fatherhood is under siege - with devastating consequences for society at large. Fathers are increasingly seen as expendable - or as part of the problem. "Does every child need a father?" David Blankenhorn asks. "Increasingly, our answer is 'no,' or at least 'not necessarily.'""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The author of Disturbing the Nest: Famiy Change and Decline in Modern Society reveals how the disintegration of the child-centered, two-parent family, and the weakening commitment of fathers to their children that usually follows, are a central cause of many of America's worst individual and social problems.
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James M. Herzog's Father Hunger: Explorations with Adults and Children will quickly take its place both as a landmark contribution to developmental psychology and as an enduring classic in the clinical literature of psychoanalysis. We live in an era when a great many children grow up without a father, or, worse still, with fathers who traumatically abuse them. Yet, society continues to ignore the emotional price that children pay, and often continue to pay throughout their lives, for this tragic state of affairs. Father Hunger will change this situation. First drawn to his topic by observing the recurring nightmares of clinic-referred children of newly separated parents - nightmares in which the children's fear of their own aggression was coupled with desperate wishes for their fathers' return - Herzog went on to spend more than two decades exploring the role of the father in a variety of naturalistic settings. He discovered that the characteristically intense manner in which fathers engaged their children provided an experience of contained excitement that served as a necessary scaffolding to the children's emerging sense of self and as a potential buffer against future trauma. A brilliant observer and remarkably gifted, caring clinician, Herzog remains true to the ambiguities and multiple leves of meaning that arise in therapeutic encounters with real people. He consistently locates his therapeutic strategies and clinical discoveries within a sophisticated observational framework, thus making his formulations about father hunger and its remediation of immediate value to scientific researchers. A model of humane psychoanalytic exploration in response to a deepening social problem, Father Hunger is a clinical document destined to raise public consciousness and help shape social policy. And in the extraordinary stories of therapeutic struggle and restoration that emerge from its pages, it is a stunning testament to the resiliency of the human spirit.
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year From an obesity and neuroscience researcher with a knack for engaging, humorous storytelling, The Hungry Brain uses cutting-edge science to answer the questions: why do we overeat, and what can we do about it? No one wants to overeat. And certainly no one wants to overeat for years, become overweight, and end up with a high risk of diabetes or heart disease--yet two thirds of Americans do precisely that. Even though we know better, we often eat too much. Why does our behavior betray our own intentions to be lean and healthy? The problem, argues obesity and neuroscience researcher Stephan J. Guyenet, is not necessarily a lack of willpower or an incorrect understanding of what to eat. Rather, our appetites and food choices are led astray by ancient, instinctive brain circuits that play by the rules of a survival game that no longer exists. And these circuits don’t care about how you look in a bathing suit next summer. To make the case, The Hungry Brain takes readers on an eye-opening journey through cutting-edge neuroscience that has never before been available to a general audience. The Hungry Brain delivers profound insights into why the brain undermines our weight goals and transforms these insights into practical guidelines for eating well and staying slim. Along the way, it explores how the human brain works, revealing how this mysterious organ makes us who we are.
For Your Own Good, the contemporary classic exploring the serious if not gravely dangerous consequences parental cruelty can bring to bear on children everywhere, is one of the central works by Alice Miller, the celebrated Swiss psychoanalyst. With her typically lucid, strong, and poetic language, Miller investigates the personal stories and case histories of various self-destructive and/or violent individuals to expand on her theories about the long-term affects of abusive child-rearing. Her conclusions—on what sort of parenting can create a drug addict, or a murderer, or a Hitler—offer much insight, and make a good deal of sense, while also straying far from psychoanalytic dogma about human nature, which Miller vehemently rejects. This important study paints a shocking picture of the violent world—indeed, of the ever-more-violent world—that each generation helps to create when traditional upbringing, with its hidden cruelty, is perpetuated. The book also presents readers with useful solutions in this regard—namely, to resensitize the victimized child who has been trapped within the adult, and to unlock the emotional life that has been frozen in repression.
