Father's Attitude To Daughter's Body

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

In practice, I often come across a situation when an adult woman tells how her father comments on her appearance. These are always very charged stories. The father may say that you have different legs, chest or butt. To say that you have a lot of fat or, conversely, no body. In general, make it clear that he does not see beauty in you.

Such words, often spoken in passing, can remain for a long time, both in consciousness and unconsciousness, and be an additional trigger for anorexia or bulimia, plastic surgery. But in any case, they injure and, above all, injure narcissistically, that is, they increase the inferiority complex. Of course, dad thinks that he is doing it with the best of intentions, trying to help his daughter. But he is for her the first man who forms her idea of how men perceive her. Any critical note intensifies and becomes almost a sentence.

Let's try to analyze the motivation of a father who criticizes his daughter's body and face.

1) First of all, this is a projection of one's own inferiority complex. The child is perceived as a narcissistic extension, the daughter as an extension of the feminine part of the father's bisexuality. Consequently, the father is dissatisfied with himself as a woman, with his body as a woman, and this is what he projects onto his daughter.

2) At the same time, there is envy of the female body, with which the father copes with devaluation.

3) Third, a sexual conflict associated with desire and the prohibition of incest is played out. The daughter is depreciated in order not to want her, and at the same time she is given a recommendation on how to improve herself in order to become desirable for her father. In addition, the daughter's body can resemble the body of her own mother, and then it is devalued to protect against incest with the mother.

4) And last but not least, the Anima - the soul of a man is projected onto the daughter. Inconsistency with this beautiful image causes dissonance, which the father tries to eliminate with his criticism.

Of course, most of these motives are unconscious, and rational explanations are invented for criticism. I think it is very important for us, fathers of girls, to capture these motives of possible criticism in ourselves in order to transform concern about the appearance of our daughters into concern about our own soul. And adult daughters should know so as not to react to such statements literally, understanding their father's unconscious motives.

And this topic touches you, and what medicine did you find?

Give examples.

I think it is helpful for us to bring this theme out of the Shadow.