The Father: Who Is He?

The Image and Reality of the Father has been increasingly precarious in this past century. From the American and French Revolution, through the Industrial Revolution in which men were demoted to chain workers, on to the experience of the young father as veteran by way of two World Wars and the Vietnam war, and witness to the downfall of the Terrible Fathers (the dictators of the 20th century), there has been a historical and symbolic demise in the status and power of the Father. As shown in myths that celebrate him in Western Antiquity, the Father has been largely a cultural construction; recent, fragile, and relative. That historical and symbolic change reaches us through the collective unconscious. Is it surprising then that the increasing separation of fathers from their children in every corner of the Western world is occurring? We will discuss this century-old phenomenon in light of the dynamics of our collective experience, rather than as a sum of individual cases.