Women and the Void of the Father
Introduction: The Modern Woman
This text introduces a new topic to the website: a subject that is rarely discussed because it is difficult, uncomfortable, and obscure, both for individual and collective consciousness. I am talking about women, and the GAP, the obvious gap between how they are shown, used, imagined... and how they really are, flesh and blood, ideas and brains, soul.
The real woman is not as healthy as she is portrayed and obsessively projected on TV, movies, video games, newspapers, and commercials... all caught up in that monolithic idea of a woman who is always perfect and flawless, the indestructible heroine of modern image-conscious society, a tireless tool for commercial use in the market of capitalism and consumerism.
Returning to Earth, however, we find ourselves with a different reality... and I am not talking about the many mothers who kill their children every year in Europe or Italy, or the many who, after filing for divorce (3 out of 4 divorces are requested by women, ISTAT), do everything they can to prevent their kids from living freely with their fathers.
I am talking above all about the woman who knows moral principles and common sense.. who every day strives to put sincerity and honesty at the center of her life, in everything she does.. but she fails.. she does not perceive the meaning.. and instead she feels increasingly overwhelmed.. the need to change, to do something.. to achieve something.. something that will lead her to be, to feel, more involved, alive, loved and loving, complete, happy.
I am not talking about women who abandon themselves to hatred and destruction (although the data is significant).
The lack of meaning and direction, of love and participation in life, can lead to taking any path, even the most terrible, devastating, and self-destructive.
Therefore, in this text, and this is important, we want to focus on women, on their happiness, and argue and explain how this is directly related to the paternal experience of the girl, and even more so of the child, a child who did not receive love and guidance from the first man in her life: her Father.
The Fatherly Gift
We have often talked on this site about the father and his importance for the male, for the son who must grow up, find his direction, his meaning... and who must base it essentially on what others have done before him... living his life with courage, bringing the knowledge of man to descendants.
But what about a woman? Is this enough? No.. not only. The father also has another peculiarity for a woman, which is not only direction and values; for a woman, the father is also an additional reference point: that of love.
Love for someone else, love for what is different from her.. a man.
And, as we shall see, without her father and her love for him, given and received as a gift, a woman will find it difficult to love in turn.
She will exchange love for her neighbor with interest, love for herself with selfishness, love for man with possession and control... yet these are very different things... but evidently they are too subtle boundaries for the short-sighted eyes of the adult who has not experienced the spontaneous, total, heroic love of the little girl who abandons herself completely to her father.
A Small Inner Tribe
Every woman, therefore, even as an adult, retains within herself a small need and desire for a father, a deep and ingrained feeling, a place inside and outside where she can always be welcomed... loved, protected, embraced. (the same applies to men, even the most adult man retains a corner inside where there is a loving happy mother always waiting for him, ready to welcome and caress him).
It is an unconscious but strong and visceral feeling, one that accompanied and filled the desire for love of lovers in times of war, from the Greeks to the 1900s, where a man could face any trench, any pain, with the deep presence of his woman in his heart, and a woman could endure any weather and distance, aware of having the vivid image of her man in her heart.
But I also think of today, of those loves that are separated, but still strong, like the prisoner and his woman, twenty years apart yet their love endures, faithful, because within them there is a connection, a deep exchange of masculine and feminine, but also of father and mother, son and daughter, an inner tribe that lives in the forests of our existential and unconscious origins.
A necessary space, of inner boy and girl, we need to be recognized, a space of soul nourishment, continuity, where childhood and adolescence exist and continue to live, to never forget who we were.
For this reason, adult men and women who love each other in a mature, lasting, conscious way know that as well as being companions, as well as male and female, as well as close friends, as well as human, honest, present beings, they also need to recognize this space of mutual father and mother, and fill it, reassure it, be there with serenity.
The Silent Request
After all, it is not so difficult to observe, even in the most masculine, rebellious, ambitious, or elusive women, that's where we can see the love request.. it is the void never filled by a father, a void that brings anger or cynicism, loneliness or apathy, unhealthy ways of living that, as adults, we try to schematize, diminish, normalize... in reality, if we know how to look deeply, we will see the little girl.. the silent request for a father, for affection, security and approval, direction and meaning, that feeling and that gift which, if not experienced, will be difficult for an adult woman to find and recognize in another man, even if he is right in front of her eyes, even if he is very much in love, ready to be there with her, for her, forever.
A girl and daughter who experiences love for her father, as an adult will easily know how to transfer this psychological and instinctive space to a partner who is right for her.
Rediscovering an healty Woman's Inner Male
So what can be done? There are not many alternatives. The same rule applies to both men and women: rebuild an inner father figure. So that no one can enter, trample on, this important, intimate, delicate space.
We must return to the origins of our lives, examine our roots, understand the reasons for the absence of our fathers and parents, starting with our own family. We will discover many interesting things. We will discover, for example, that our father also had little fathering, that he did not know how to do it, or that our mother had little fathering and consequently did not recognize its importance (just think that at the beginning of the last century, children addressed their parents formally, sometimes even parents addressed each other formally..). Then, as we broaden our research, we will discover that, socially and culturally, fatherhood and motherhood, masculinity and femininity, have almost always been two worlds too far apart, isolated compartments that do not communicate, making love impossible between two things that have no point of contact, no common ground, no means of understanding each other, seeing each other, or comparing themselves.
This is the culture of the past, from the Middle Ages to the modern World Wars, dark times of misery and ignorance. You can't change a culture in a few years; it will take time, but it also depends on us. We can start changing the culture today by starting to change our lives for the better.
(this article written by Fabio Barzagli was published in October 2009 by larepubblicaditersite.it)
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