The Wounded Woman. Linda Schierse Leonard
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and perfectionistic tendencies, he had a chronic disease which forced him to show vulnerability and weakness. Since he never admitted his vulnerability Mary experienced her father as though he were two different people—the strong, authoritarian judge, and the weak, sick man. The men in her dreams also appeared in these opposing ways. There were men with tiny phalluses who were impotent, and there were violent men trying to stab and kill her. Mary felt that the impotent men symbolized her tremendous lack of self-confidence, and that the violent, attacking men were the voice of self-depreciation. Mary’s mother was much like herself, a warm, outgoing woman, but she did not oppose her husband, Since Mary had a good relationship with her mother, she first turned to an older woman for support. But in this relationship she tended to play the role of pleasing daughter, while the older woman often criticized her in an authoritarian manner similar to that of Mary’s father. In the course of analysis she began to gain confidence in herself and recognized the double pattern of rebelling against the authority of the father, yet submitting to it by pleasing the older authoritarian woman. Eventually she was able to assert herself in relation to her older woman friend. Then as the threatening men and the impotent men began to disappear from her dreams, she began a relationship with an emotionally mature man whom she later married. She now had enough confidence in herself to accept the challenge of returning to her love of art and began to study a career in this field. With her new-found strength she was even able to have a meaningful talk with her father, who, in a moment of crisis due to his illness, acknowledged his vulnerability. This enabled a closer emotional relationship between father and daughter.
These are only four examples of wounded women who have suffered from injured relationships with their fathers. There are many variations on this theme. The following dream reveals the general psychological situation of a wounded woman who suffers from an impaired relation to the father.
I am a young girl trapped in a cage holding my baby. Outside is my father riding freely on a horse over green pastures. I long to reach him and try to get out of the cage, sobbing deeply. But the cage topples over. I am not sure whether my baby and I will be crushed by the cage or whether we will be free.
This dream images the separation between father and daughter and the imprisonment of the daughter and her creative potentialities. There is the longing to reach the free energy of the father. But the daughter must first get out of the cage, and this requires a risk. She and her baby may be crushed in the process, or they also may go free. While this is the dream of only one woman, I believe it portrays dramatically the way many other women have been imprisoned by a poor relation to the father, alienating them from a positive relation to fathering in themselves.
On the personal level, there are many ways the father-daughter wound can occur. The father may have been extremely weak and a cause of shame for his daughter; for example, a man who can’t hold a job or who drinks or gambles, etc. Or he may be an “absent father,” having left home by choice as does the man who “loves ’em and leaves ’em.” The absence may also be due to death, war, divorce, or illness—each of which separates the father from his family. Still another way a father can wound a daughter is to indulge her so much that she has no sense of limit, values, and authority. He may even unconsciously fall in love with her and thus keep her bound to him in this way. Or he may look down upon and devalue the feminine because his own inner feminine side has been sacrificed to the ideals of macho-masculine power and authority. He may be a hard worker, successful in his profession, but passive at home and not really actively involved with his daughter, i.e., a detached father. Whatever the case may be, if the father is not there for his daughter in a committed and responsible way, encouraging the development of her intellectual, professional, and spiritual side and valuing the uniqueness of her femininity, there results an injury to the daughter’s feminine spirit.
“The Feminine” is an expression that is currently being re-discovered and re-described anew by women out of their own experiences. Women have begun to realize that men have been defining femininity through their conscious and culturally conditioned expectations of women’s roles and through their unconscious projections on women. In contrast to the notion of femininity defined from a cultural or biological role, my approach is to see “the feminine” symbolically as a way of being, as an inherent principle of human existence. In my experience the feminine reveals itself primarily via images and emotional responses and I draw upon these in the course of this book.1
The father-daughter wound is not only an event happening in the lives of individual women. It is a condition of our culture as well.2 Whenever there is a patriarchal authoritarian attitude which devalues the feminine by reducing it to a number of roles or qualities which come, not from woman’s own experience, but from an abstract view of her—there one finds the collective father overpowering the daughter, not allowing her to grow creatively from her own essence.
Whether the father-daughter wound occurs on the personal level or the cultural level, or both, it is a major issue for most women today. Some women try to avoid dealing with it by blaming their fathers and/or men in general. Others may try to avoid it by denying there is a problem and living out the traditionally accepted feminine roles. But both these routes result in giving up responsibility for their own transformation, the one via blame, the other via adaptation. I believe the real task for women’s transformation these days is to discover for themselves who they are. But part of this discovery entails a dialogue with their history, with the developmental influences that have affected them personally, culturally, and spiritually.
As a daughter grows up, her emotional and spiritual growth is deeply affected by her relationship to her father. He is the first masculine figure in her life and is a prime shaper of the way she relates to the masculine side of herself and ultimately to men. Since he is “other,” i.e., different from herself and her mother, he also shapes her differentness, her uniqueness and individuality. The way he relates to her femininity will affect the way she grows into womanhood. One of his roles is to lead the daughter from the protected realm of the mother and the home into the outside world, helping her to cope with the world and its conflicts. His attitude toward work and success will color his daughter’s attitude. If he is confident and successful, this will be communicated to his daughter. But if he is afraid and unsuccessful, she is likely to take over this fearful attitude. Traditionally, the father also projects ideals for his daughter. He provides a model for authority, responsibility, decision-making, objectivity, order, and discipline. When she is old enough, he steps back so she may internalize these ideals and actualize them in herself. If his own relation to these areas is either too rigid or too indulgent, that will affect his daughter’s relation to these areas as well.3
Some fathers err on the side of indulgence. Because they have not established limits for themselves, because they do not feel their own inner authority and have not established a sense of inner order and discipline, they provide inadequate models for their daughters. Such men often remain “eternal boys” (the puer aeternus). Men who identify too strongly with this god of youth stay fixated at the adolescent stages of development.4 They may be romantic dreamers who avoid the conflicts of practical life, unable to make commitments. Such men tend to dwell in the realm of possibilities, avoiding actuality, leading a provisional life. Quite often they are close to the springs of creativity and are sensitive searchers for spirit. But since their interior year centers around spring and summer, the depth and rebirth which comes from fall and winter is lacking. By disposition, this type of man tends to be impatient. He has not developed the quality to “hold,” to bear through a difficult situation. Positively, he is often charming, romantic, and even inspiring, for he reveals spirit in the form of possibility, the creative spark, the search. But negatively considered, his tendency is not to carry anything through to completion since he avoids hard times and the down-to-earth work and struggle required to actualize the possible. Some extreme examples of these men who remain eternal boys can be found in addicts who remain forever dependent on their addiction, men who cannot work, Don Juan men who run from woman to woman, men who remain passive sons to their wives, and men who seduce their daughters by romanticizing them. A few are dazzlingly successful for a brief period, such as the movie star James Dean and the rock star Jim Morrison, only to succumb to their self-destructive tendencies, leaving a legend and even a cult behind, emphasizing the archetypal character of their fascination.
The daughters