The Deficit Father Syndrome

Note the deficient length of the index finger. See also page16.

The therapist would encounter this syndrome only in its most extreme form – a profound sense of isolation and alienation in what we have come to identify as “peer-group rejection,” (not the subject of this work.) Much as the narcissist personality will never seek the intervention of a professional behavioral specialist, so too would the bearers of this awkward parental history feel that nothing is amiss about themselves. In these notes I will offer little more than an introduction to the basic fundaments – the first building blocks – of the Deficit Father Syndrome. Apologies if I leave its more complex expressions to the applied inventiveness of the reader.

The morphological representation of this development in personality is a digital formula exhibiting a short index finger relative to the middle and ring fingers. If it is there it cannot be missed.

History:

The Deficit Father Syn­drome underlines a history wherein the individual, from that period in his or her infancy when the image of the father as a "significant other" began to assume concrete proportions, suffered a deficit, as it were, in cer­tain very specific and very central components, which, normally, are natural to and consistent with a relationship between a father and his in­fant/child. What the Deficit Father Syndrome will depict is the subsequent psychical organiza­tion of the individual both as a direct extension of this deficit and as an expression of the response aimed at compensating for it.

When the cognitive development of the infant slowly permits an awareness of a larger world of experiences and impressions, the central image in this new landscape of objects and colors is that of the father. Hitherto its only knowledge of the world was via its body centered mother-experiences. (Even had it been the father who had actively handled the infant at this time this would not change) but now it finds the physical person of its father central to its attentions. Beyond the father, but in the very same dimension where the infant first came upon him, it finds everyone else.

In the framework of its earliest auto-erotic experiences, the bonding, the sense of attachment, and of being wholly contained by the mother was almost entirely a function of its internal body experiences. It knew its mother via the experience of its organic self – essentially the way her voice, touch, body warmth, physical handling, feeding and all else had molded it.

This changes soon enough, but upon recognizing her physical person and linking her to these internalized experiences, the infant also comes upon its father who serves as its bridge to its outer social world. Unlike the mother, the father had emerged from a dimension external to its hitherto internal body experiences and organic self-experiences.

Those early mother experiences along with the new physical person of the mother, would normally have delivered the child a knowledge of her contribution to its physical security and emotional well-being. But now its world had considerably expanded. Along with the mother it discovers a father, and the child’s future world experiences became a function of the intervention of both in its life.  

Until about the age of three the child must record a number of very specific father-experiences. In this regard we shall not be describing what would merely be nice for the child to have happen, rather we would introduce these experiences as needs of a most critically important order. The first of these experiences would be the father's very early and unqualified identification with his child.  Following this would be his profound readiness to integrate the child's existence with his own. This does not come about as a conscious “formula” which the father applies in compulsive fashion to their relationship. The child will know this from the tone of his voice and each time it sees the image of itself reflected in his eyes. Finally there must be a com­fortable physical intimacy between them.

To the degree that these quantities are absent from the child/father rela­tionship...to the degree that they are withheld from the child...so does the child record the natural rejection of itself by others as an inherent reference to itself. This person will come to relate to other people with a marked degree of guarded­ness. It will be that this person's social interac­tions (apart from the closer and more trusted relationships) will lack a certain fluidity. Attitudes will have a forced, defensive quality. Even before reaching adulthood, this person will experience feelings of hesitancy, uncertainty, discomfort, possibly even a sense of alienation in his or her social interactions. When more intensely expressed, the person would be apprehensive about the possibility of being the focus of the hostility of others. He or she may also feel a certain hostility directed toward these same people.

There is another side to this coin. While these father-experiences are not genetically dictated, one might have guessed differently. If the child is denied them it will be moved to compulsively compensate for these deficits in the framework of experiences with the body that is essentially an extension of the father, namely the larger social world. To compensate for these deficits (and they are worth repeating) the father’s “organic” identification with the child, the integration of the child’s existence with his own, and the close physical intimacy where the child might be carried on the father’s shoulders, for example, this individual will be powerfully driven for the better part of his or her life to somehow win the awareness of others and record their profound recognition and respect. In more extreme instances, the compensation may take the form of some dangerous action that only one with a superior social morality would dare undertake. There are many excellent examples from around the world, most notably those who confront or otherwise threaten the security of their country. Their numbers would include such as Mordecai Vanunu from Israel, and, more recently, Edward Snowden from the United States.