Transforming the Father-Daughter Relationship

Combining myth, fairy tale, literature, and real-life stories, a Jungian therapist demonstrates how dysfunctional father-daughter relationships adversely affect women by compromising their natural feminine ideals. Reprint.

plex and unexplored relationship in a woman's life is with her father. If their bond is close, she is referred to as "Daddy's little girl." As cute as that may sound in childhood, a "father's daughter" later pays a high price for her favored status. In order to sustain his approval, protection, and love, she often distances herself from her mother and rejects her own feminine nature. By identifying solely with her father, her development as a woman is arrested in daughterhood.

In this unique and fascinating look at a pervasive personal and cultural issue, family therapist Maureen Murdock at last reveals the unspoken truth about daughters and the immense power the fathers they idealize have over them. Fathers' Daughters explores how these exclusive relationships affect every aspect of a woman's life. While fathers' daughters are often high achievers in the outside world, their denial of their innate feminine nature wreaks havoc on other aspects of their lives -- from fe