Shadows of Fatherhood, Jung, and Film

Book excerpt: Every picture tells a story, and stories have the power to educate. Looking at two key Jungian archetypes – the father and the shadow – from a challenging perspective, this book investigates the negative, shadowy side of fatherhood and its detrimental effect on children by presenting a collection of stories from all over the world. Blurring the line between fiction and fact, art and academic theory, the book travels across a difficult psychosocial landscape, discussing family life, mental health, and criminality. Mark Holmwood highlights the educational value of these stories whilst exploring the father–child dynamic, adverse childhood experiences, father hunger, asymmetrical power relations, psychological manipulation, narcissism, domestic violence, sexual abuse, patricide, and filicide. Jungian and post-Jungian viewpoints on the bond between fathers and their children are woven into a bigger, interconnected narrative which invites the readers to re-think clinical, sociological, and mythological connections through the lens of modern masculinity and men’s studies. Discussing five different types of negative fathers, the book presents their children’s struggles and underlines their resilience at the same time, emphasising assertion, challenge, questioning, and if necessary, acceptance, all being a part of the complex and transformative psychological process called individuation. Written with a clear and direct style, Shadows of Fatherhood, Jung, and Film will be of interest to mental health professionals, Jungian scholars, students, teachers and researchers in social sciences, humanities, and the arts, as well as general readers with a distinctive interest in men’s studies, father–child relations, and cinema.