The Negative Father Complex

The book "The Negative Father Complex" was written by author and psychoanalyst Garrett Jefferis. The book explores how the father complex affects people throughout their lives and how understanding it can help people heal from psychological wounds.

The negative father complex can be defined as an eruption from an adult child's unconscious that usually takes place in the late twenties or early thirties. It is characterized by a degree of emotion, resentment, and hatred entirely out of proportion to any maltreatment attributed to the father. Once activated, the negative father archetype leads the adult child to view the father distortedly as unbearable, intrusive, interfering, and disruptive. The father looms larger than life as a negative influence. There is a projection of all things irritating and damaging onto the father and an ongoing preoccupation with the child's list of past grievances against the father. A considerable energy charge builds up around the natural and supposed sins, which occasionally erupts into the open. The emotional tone is highly amplified, resentful, and harmful.

The reactivity may come partly from the father's biological role as the enforcer of standards. According to Erich Fromm, the mother's position toward the child is unconditional love and acceptance. The father's role is quite different. It does not involve unconditional love and acceptance but rather ongoing demands that the child meets basic behavior and performance standards to get the father's approval. The father's biological duty is to train the child to complete the world and function successfully. After a few years, this natural role gets very heavy for both the child and the father. After a few decades, it may become almost unbearable for both.

The father complex has a component in the father's and child's unconscious. In the father's senseless, there is an investment in the child's performance. That performance reflects directly on the father and the success of his efforts and role in preparing the child for adult life in the world. Failure of any sort by the child feels like a personal failure to the father. Since no one encounters the world without problems and losses, there is inevitably disappointment in the child's performance, however unconscious it may be. However, the father may try consciously to unhook and let the child have total autonomy. The father cannot unhook (because it is lodged in the unconscious mind) his preoccupation with the child's life. The child acutely feels the father's disappointment, even if it is unexpressed (which is rare). 

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The child reacts with anger. From the child's standpoint, the father's watchful assessments, periodic disappointments, and negative judgments seem unnecessary, intrusive, heavy, black, burdensome and enraging. They also appear as an attack on the child's autonomy. At this point, the father has become the child's living super-ego. Even if he remains completely silent about his assessments, disappointments, and judgments, the child feels them as a negative commentary on their adequacy and value. At this stage, the father engenders rage just by being alive. 

He need not misbehave to earn the child's rage. It is already boiling in the child's organism. The father now embodies an ongoing issue and problem in the child's psyche, an unwelcome destroyer of the child's fundamental worth and happiness. The negative father archetype is now fully activated.

Part of the resentment comes from the father, who has occupied and continues to occupy such a prominent place in the child's psyche. Obtaining his approval is one of the organism's primary goals as a small child. There may be fatigue just from battling the father mentally within oneself, apart from fighting with him over the world's issues. The desire may be to get the father out of one's head, free of his presence in the psyche. However, in how we are put together, the mother and the father archetypes are permanently lodged and loom large in mind. They can be rejected in the world but never excised from the psyche.

With its resentment about male control, the concept of patriarchy is the father complex perceived at the level of society. Feminism and its attempts to get free of male domination is also a reaction to the father complex. Control issues may be rooted in the father complex and its rage over male interference.

The society offers no model of appropriate separation. Ideally, the father and the mother would happily bow out of the child's life when adulthood is reached, and everyone would live happily ever after. 

This seldom happens. Either the father is too uninvolved with the child, creating resentment, or the father continues to be invested and involved in the child's life, creating irritation. The Negative Father Complex « don-nix.com. https://www.don-nix.com/the-negative-father-complex-2/

Once the negative father archetype is activated, the child may blame the father for every ill in life. All the shame, guilt, and disappointment about his mistakes may be psychologically dumped on the father. The father will not welcome this. It will feel unjustified, excessive, blaming, and ungrateful.

The work that needs to be done around this issue centers on expectations. On the father's side, lowering expectations of the child's life can help. Everyone's life has holes, failures, and disappointments. The father's own life has these shadow elements. Why should the child's life not have them? It is an unreasonable expectation that it would not. Lowering expectations might reduce disappointment and the child's rage at experiencing that disappointment.

On the child's side, lowering the expectations that the father will approve 100%, even if the child's actions impact the father negatively, would help. Momentary disapproval in a lifetime relationship with love and support and the full range of emotions in it is not terminal. Unreasonable, inflated expectations must be worked with on both sides of the relationship.

Mary Makariou, The Negative Father Complex (London: Intellect, 2017).

The Negative Father Complex « don-nix.com. https://www.don-nix.com/the-negative-father-complex-2/

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