But other persons are able to keep up a surface appearance of functionality; they hold jobs, they get married, and they have children. Here are the dark roots of symptom after symptom of secret resentment for the father .
Addictions (alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, bling, pornography, etc.) allow them to feel filled when they are really empty; thus they feel nothing .
Argumentativeness prevents them from accepting truth, which includes the truth that their father has failed them; thus they accept nothing .
Immodesty (dressing so as to reveal the body rather than clothe it with dignity; or making the body into an object with tattoos, piercings, and unnatural hair styles and colorings) prevents them from respecting their own bodies; thus they respect nothing .
Mental confusion (often expressed by forgetting things or as difficulty with math) prevents them from engaging with the signs and symbols of life; thus they engage with nothing .
Procrastination prevents them from stepping out into the world they don?t know how to negotiate in the first place; thus they accomplish nothing .
Sexual preoccupation (whether as self-created mental fantasies, pornography, lust, or sexual acts) prevents them from experiencing emotional intimacy; thus they are intimate with nothing
In the end, all these ?nothings,? taken together, lead to the nothingness of death. On the one hand, the death is symbolic death , which keeps a child emotionally disabled as punishment for his or her anger. On the other hand, the death is real death ?through slow self-sabotage or through outright suicide?by which the child, in making herself or himself the ?missing one,? draws attention away from the truth that the father has been missing from the child?s life all along.
There is no current psychiatric diagnosis for this collection of symptoms, so I have named a psychoanalytic diagnosis: Ira Patrem Latebrosa (hidden anger at the father). This is an anger at the father that so cloaks itself in invisibility that a person afflicted with it will deny that it even exists. Yet it does exist, and the evidence above proves it, like tracks in the snow that reveal the presence of an animal lurking nearby.
W hen fathers are weak and lacking in compassionate command authority, mothers will often step in to take control of the family. More often than not this control will take the form of manipulation, using sulking, withdrawal, and anger to make others bend to the mothers’ will.
Consequently, children in such families can become enmeshed with their mothers, seeking where to find a sugar daddy in aberdeen always to please the mothers, and always terrified of slipping up and drawing down on themselves the wrath of a slighted mother. As a result of always trying to do what their mothers want, such children, when they become adults, will be preoccupied with the thought of, “What would my mother want me to do?” Thus they will be lacking in a confident ability to think independently.
In the unconscious, however, the anger gets distorted because it is difficult for children to be angry with a father from whom they still desire a sign of love
Many of these persons can fall into stifled, dysfunctional lives and suicidal tendencies. Nevertheless, some of these persons can function fairly well, and they can even give the impression of being good workers. But when faced with any stressful, trying situation that requires decisive action, these persons will be unable to assert a clear and confident command authority to cope with the situation; instead they will tend either to withdraw into fear or into sulking depression or to get angry and fly into a rage, essentially doing to others what their mothers did to them.
