Filled with practical ideas and self-evaluation tools, Father Hunger both encourages and challenges men to "embrace the high calling of fatherhood," becoming the dads that their families and our culture so desperately need them to be.

James M. Herzog's Father Hunger: Explorations with Adults and Children will quickly take its place both as a landmark contribution to developmental psychology and as an enduring classic in the clinical literature of psychoanalysis. We live in an era when a great many children grow up without a father, or, worse still, with fathers who traumatically abuse them. Yet, society continues to ignore the emotional price that children pay, and often continue to pay throughout their lives, for this tragic state of affairs. Father Hunger will change this situation. First drawn to his topic by observing the recurring nightmares of clinic-referred children of newly separated parents - nightmares in which the children's fear of their own aggression was coupled with desperate wishes for their fathers' return - Herzog went on to spend more than two decades exploring the role of the father in a variety of naturalistic settings. He discovered that the characteristically intense manner in which fathers engaged their children provided an experience of contained excitement that served as a necessary scaffolding to the children's emerging sense of self and as a potential buffer against future trauma. A brilliant observer and remarkably gifted, caring clinician, Herzog remains true to the ambiguities and multiple leves of meaning that arise in therapeutic encounters with real people. He consistently locates his therapeutic strategies and clinical discoveries within a sophisticated observational framework, thus making his formulations about father hunger and its remediation of immediate value to scientific researchers. A model of humane psychoanalytic exploration in response to a deepening social problem, Father Hunger is a clinical document destined to raise public consciousness and help shape social policy. And in the extraordinary stories of therapeutic struggle and restoration that emerge from its pages, it is a stunning testament to the resiliency of the human spirit.

An insatiable need for sex and love. Periods of overeating or starving. A pattern of unstable and painful relationships. Does this sound painfully familiar? Trauma counselor Kelly McDaniel has seen these traits over and over in clients who feel trapped in cycles of harmful behaviors-and are unable to stop. Many of us find ourselves stuck in unhealthy habits simply because we don't see a better way. With Mother Hunger, McDaniel helps women break the cycle of destructive behavior by taking a fresh look at childhood trauma and its lasting impact. In doing so, she destigmatizes the shame that comes with being under-mothered and misdiagnosed. McDaniel offers a healing path with powerful tools that include therapeutic interventions and lifestyle changes in service to healthy relationships. The constant search for mother love can be a lifelong emotional burden, but healing begins with knowing and naming what we are missing. McDaniel is the first clinician to identify Mother Hunger, which demystifies the search for love and provides the compass that each woman needs to end the struggle with achy, lonely emptiness, and come home to herself.

Father Hunger describes the emptiness that many of us experience because we still crave the comfort and security that our fathers did not provide. Your relationship with your father not only affects your emotional style, your relationships with your children and spouse, and your ability to handle life in general, but it deeply affects the way you think about God. If you're looking for a "feel-good" book about father and child relationships, this isn't it... If you and your father have had a little spat and are still holding a grudge against each other, find another resource to help you! This book is for (1) people who, as children, didn't receive the quality and quantity of love they wanted and deserved from their fathers and (2) others who are currently related to such people. Although I have had a wonderful loving father, I have always experienced a certain "father hunger" because he was away so much during my childhood. I now know what I missed. This book offers so much understanding and hope for all who suffer the various emotional pangs of "father hunger." -Gigi Graham Past National Advisor for Women's Affairs, Rapha Robert McGee has zeroed in on a topic that has practical relevance for all of us. He has produced a book that is practical, interesting, creative, and sprinkled with good case histories. I found it to be helpful. I predict you will too. -Gary R. Collins, PhD I can't think of a more timely book than Father Hunger. I am surrounded by people-me included-who have grown up with a hole in their heart from an emotionally or physically absent father. Don't look for quick-fix solutions or pious pronouncements in this book. But if you really want to see the hunger pangs subside, this book is for you. -John Trent Author, Speaker, President of Strong Families

A wrenchingly honest, eloquent memoir “about true nourishment that comes not from [eating] but from engaging on a spiritual path."—Los Angeles Times In this brave and perceptive account of compulsion and the healing process, Bullitt-Jonas describes a childhood darkened by the repressive shadows of her alcoholic father and her emotionally reclusive mother, whose demands for excellence, poise, and self-control drove Bullitt-Jonas to develop an insatiable hunger. What began with pilfering extra slices of bread at her parents' dinner table turned into binges with cream pies and pancakes, sometimes gaining as much as eleven pounds in four days. When the family urged her father into treatment, the author recognized her own addiction and embarked on the path to recovery by discovering the spiritual hunger beneath her craving for food.

“A masterwork of enormous power.” —Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko The searing debut of “one of the most influential writers in American letters…Hunger is a masterpiece, a necessary haunting” (Justin Torres, author of We the Animals). A powerful exploration of the Asian American experience, Hunger weaves the forces of war and magic, food and desire, ghosts and family into poignant tales of love and loss. Celebrated author Lan Samantha Chang illuminates the lives of first-generation immigrants from China, culturally and emotionally uprooted from their homeland, who mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment—and shows how their choices shape their children. The characters who inhabit this extraordinary collection, “a work of gorgeous, enduring prose” (Helen C. Wan, Washington Post), are caught between the burden of their past and the fragility of their unchartered future.

This book explores eating disorders in women as a culturally induced phenomenon the author calls "father hunger", or "relationship disappointment" where fathers are physically, and/or emotionally disconnected from their families. Treatment, solutions, and resolutions are offered for families.