PHALLIC NARCISSISTIC VULNERABILITY

AND THE EMPTY NEST SYNDROME

NICHOLAS C. AVERY, M.D.

Harvard Medical School

74 Fenwood Road
Bos/on, Massachusetts 02115

The empty nest syndrome has been described as a mother's

depressive reaction to the loss of her children and her maternal
function. A connection between her identity as a mother and her
ego ideal is disrupted; her self-esteem is damaged and the ensuing
anger, and her strenuous defensive reactions against this rage,
temporarily paralyze efforts to shift to other facets of her valued
identity.
While focusing on the empty nest syndrome, this paper will
highlight six men whose phallic vulnerabilities precluded assisting
their spouses' transitions from motherhood to increasingly ca-
thected wifehood. During this period they also withheld from
their children sufficiently unambivalent permission to leave home.
This negative activity resulted in marked family and marital
turmoil, in dramatic contrast to the glittering vocational success
of the six fathers studied.
One of the major accomplishments in healthy phallic develop-
ment is the attenuation of the boy's tie to his mother and a grow-
ing identification with his father as a strong and sustaining figure.
Although such identification is a life-long process, the oedipal
phase is crucial because it permits the young child to test his
father's love under the onslaught of repeated phallic challenges.
A patient, yet involved, father teaches his son that he can neither
be toppled by the boy's wishes nor will he retaliate for those fan-
tasies (Zetzel, 1970; Ross, 1977; Weinberger and Muller, 1974).
Mother's task during the oedipal period and indeed throughout
most of the boy's postsymbiotic phase is to delicately balance
accepting availability with appropriate detachment. Within this
dialectic, the boy is free to move toward and from his first love
object and to throw in his lot with his father without fear that he

Journal of The American Academy of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 9, No.4, 525-537 ()981)

© 1981 John Wiley & Sons. Inc. CCC 0090-3604/81/040525-13$01.30
526/ AVERY

has permanently alienated his mother and thus cut himself off
from vital supplies (Ross, 1977).
The oedipal phase and its reinforced identification with a strong
yet nurturant father also moves the boy from his obsession with
himself and his phallus to a maturer concept of masculinity. Here
father's example as a man who puts his strength in the service of
both his narcissism and his family prepares the boy to eventually
do likewise.
The six men here presented have failed to master many of the
transitional steps from phallic narcissism to genitality. They are
driven, frightened, distrustful of their regressive longings, and must
constantly prove their strength. To avoid feeling engulfed by their
dependency needs, they must denigrate or flee from their wives
even as they lean on them. Their own fathers were remote and
passive or distant and tyrannical. Mothers are described as strong
and enveloping or weak and subjugated.
The wives of these men are sad, long-suffering, passively angry
and subtly undermining of their husbands. Their own relationships
with their parents were impaired, as was their sense of feminine
identity. All bore a child within a year of their marriage although
none had compelling religious reasons to avoid contraception. The
early pregnancy is suggestive of the marital impasse Bowen (1960)
describes in which it soon becomes clear the desired intimacy will
never be achieved. Thus libidinal voids develop and the children
are enjoined to attempt to paper over what Bowen terms the
parental "emotional divorce."
The children in this study yield to their parents' unconscious
mandate that they compensate for marital dissatisfactions (Zinner
and Shapiro, 1972). The roles they play are sometimes subtle; at
other times they are blatant, as when two sets of parents confide
their sexual activities (in and outside the marriage) to their adoles-
cent daughters. Given the compensatory functions these adoles-
cents serve, they are more than usually bound to their families
and in deep conflict with their developmental needs to separate.
Intuiting all too well the impact their departure would have on
their beleaguered parents, the children who came to psychiatric
investigation transparently felt guilty that their growing up is
precipitating a painful empty nest syndrome.

CASE MATERIAL

In keeping with the fathers' vocational success, five of the six

families were solidly upper-middle class. The sixth was headed by
 PHALLIC NARCISSISTIC VULNERABILITY / 527

a man of academic rather than fiscal stature. All fathers had

college degrees; four of the six completed graduate studies as well.
All wives were college graduates; half worked part- or full-time
outside the home.
Within two years of the time they presented, five of the six had
experienced an actual separation (for college) from their oldest
child or children; the child of the sixth was a high school senior.
In addition, three families were struggling with the imminent
departure of their youngest child.

The A's
The head of a large business firm came for consultation after
a suicidal gesture prompted by his wife's threat to leave him. Two
years ago, when his only child left home, he began an affair.
Although he left many hints of his extramarital activities, he
denied his wife's suspicions when confronted with them. It was
only when he discovered that she, too, had taken a lover that he
angrily conceded that her suspicions were correct; she thereupon
made plans to leave him.
Their sexual adjustment was described as unsatisfactory. Mr. A
found his wife "cold." She resented his affairs. He developed low
back pain and other vague ailments which diminished his interest;
he also suffered bouts of impotence and premature ejaculation.
Mrs. A said her husband confused her. Either he was extremely
jealous of her even talking with men or he was inviting men over
to join them in nude bathing. About this she said, "He has to show
what he has," also insisting she go braless.
Their daughter was often a go-between in these sexual struggles.
Each parent presented lurid details of their infidelities and asked
her to referee their disputes.
In addition to the transparent feelings of sexual inadequacy,
dependency conflicts are suggested by the husband's panic at the
prospect of being left and Mrs. A's tolerance of his affairs. They
met as adolescents immediately after Mr. A left home, purportedly
fed up with his parents' constant battling and feeling he could
trust neither of them to help him with life goals. After their en-
gagement he panicked and turned to another woman. When, in
response, Mrs. A returned his ring he frantically wooed her back.
Thus the cycle (closeness, fear, then pulling away to a third
figure) which may end their marriage had its prefigurement in the
courtship.

Another feature of several of these cases is that, although the

528/ AVERY

wife is disparaged, her support is quietly solicited. For example,

as the day approached when Mr. A had to address large business
meetings, he became increasingly anxious and self-doubting. His
wife's reassurances were sustaining but completely obscured when
the invariably successful speech was delivered.
Such a backstage role also characterized the relationship of Mrs.
B to her extraordinarily accomplished husband.

The B's
Mr. B courted his wife by enumerating a long list of his creden-
tials, implying she would be foolish to pass up such a wise invest-
ment. With enough money to retire comfortably, he still worked
in a driven manner the same long hours that he had put in as a
fledgling businessman.
"He was never my friend," he says of his domineering father;
when he had died five years before, Mr. B did not grieve for him.
Nor was he close to his passive, long-suffering mother and his
siblings. Although defensive and closed in the initial interview, it
was easy to imagine this executive taking a commanding, assertive
posture in his work. His wife agreed that he was well-respected and
always did a thorough job of everything he undertook. She also
related, however, that he had periodic and private collapses of
confidence during which he developed a great deal of anxiety
about his heart and required the reassurance of his physician. The
work-ups were always negative.
Mr. B often consulted his wife about what he should wear and
complied with her suggestions. Once dressed, however, he would
never change to meet some objection or second thought she might
have. In telling of this tendency, Mrs. B sounded patronizing, as
though her husband were a little boy who could not be trusted to
manage his own wardrobe.
Another behind-the-scenes role Mrs. B played was on her
husband's business trips. He liked her to accompany him even
though his long and intricate schedule precluded any but the
briefest amount of time together. He felt more relaxed knowing
she was at hand while he negotiated with other businessmen.
The B's came for consultation when their youngest and only
child still at home was pressing to go to boarding school. In the
setting of her daughter's separation wishes, the mother tearfully
recalled the loss of her own sister who was "like a mother" to her.
After our second meeting the concern for the adolescent markedly
 PHALLIC NARCISSISTIC VULNERABILITY / 529

abated and the locus of distress switched to the marital relation-

ship. Although everything seemed ideal outwardly, Mrs. B said she
had known for a long time that she and her husband were not
really close and that this put a burden on their children, especially
the youngest.

The struggle over who controls what Mr. B wears is particularly

striking and characteristic of these phallic narcissistic men. They
are both dependent and sensitively counterdependent, lest their
wishes for maternal nurturance shift too much control to their
wives. Common, too, are the outer displays of strength and peri-
odic hypochondriacal collapses (Reich, 1973). The first two cases
also hint at the theme of phallic collapse or what Weinberg and
Muller (1974) term the Icarian fall in the phallic narcissistic
character. Mr. A and Mr. B tripped onto hypochondriacal fears
that seriously undermined their customary robust confidence.
In a third instance, a series of serious losses led to an acute
crisis from which the family has not fully recovered. Thus, the
adolescent fantasy that to separate is to abandon is in this case
so in accord with the parents' reaction to their child's leaving
home that the situation cannot be adequately resolved. We see in
the daughter much guilty stalling and a painful sense of responsi-
bility for her beleaguered parents.

The C's
Miss C came to consultation at age 20, on the eve of her de-
parture for another part of the country. She quickly made it plain
that, although she had been uncomfortable leaving home before,
her predominant concern this time was for her parents. Since her
younger sibling was about to enter college, there would be no chil-
dren left at home. She predicted these losses would fall heavily
on her parents since they did not get along; mother was chroni-
cally depressed and father escaped into work and was rarely at
home.
Three years previously the mother's best friend had been killed
and the mother had not yet resolved her grief. A year later father
was diagnosed as having a fatal illness and shortly thereafter
mother had surgery and a protracted convalescence. Since then the
parents have been fighting over who is or is not able to function as
an intact parent and the children have been repeatedly drawn into
this conflict.
530 I AVERY

Even though it is now clear that father was misdiagnosed and is

in fact well, the divisions remain. Miss C feels that she and her
older siblings supported their parents throughout the marriage;
now she is determined to leave but feels guilty doing so. In seeking
therapy she makes an implicit request that I sanction the part of
her resolved to separate.

The D's
Although they differed about much in their marriage, Mr. and
Mrs. D agreed that their son's departure for college a year before
was a serious loss to the family. Outgoing, warm, and nurturant,
this young man was a confidant of his parents and a strong sup-
port to his siblings. Unlike the A parents, the D's did not involve
their son in the details of their discord or sexual life, but each
acknowledged turning to him when they felt estranged from each
other.
The phallic narcissistic character and his mate characteristically
remember being unsupported in childhood by their parent of the
same sex. Mrs. D, whose mother was chronically depressed and
unable to cope, was raised by her grandmother before becoming
the constant companion of her father. Now when she feels unable
to get a response from her husband she recalls in anger her moth-
er's depressions and unavailability. Mrs. D's father pulled away
during her teenage years and made it clear that while he was en-
grossed in her developing sexuality, he was too anxious to support
her through her adolescence.
Mr. D was 40 and almost a caricature of a hard-driving entre-
preneur who talked about his business entirely in terms of its
grand size. By painful contrast, Mr. D stated that his penis is
very small. He had never felt anything but shame and vulnerability
over his sexual organ and concerns regarding its size have been
compounded with episodes of impotence.
Obese as a youngster and subject to peer ridicule, his mother
had declared him just to her liking. This led to his distrust of her
and, ultimately, of the sincerity of all women. It pained him that
father preferred his more athletic brother. After recounting a
recent business success Mr. 0 felt his triumph was being devalued
even as he could see his father beam approvaL
He was engrossed by a big house, expensive car, and the best
label in his clothes. Small imperfections enraged him. He was
sexually aloof from his wife and could not forgive her for turning
 PHALLIC NARCISSISTIC VULNERABILITY I 531

to another man several years ago despite her continued remorse

and elaborate efforts to make amends.

The E's
After 23 years the E's marriage seemed burned out. He was
away much of the time, either in his general medical practice or
playing cards. She said, "I've had it raising children," but the
impression she gave was that this has been the major gratification
in her marriage. Her girls were gone, leaving only her son, from
whom she felt distant. ""I don't know how to raise males," she
said. She described the marriage as either barren or abusive, de-
pending on her husband's absence or presence. When asked why
she stayed, she replied that her mother was critical of her and
would never take her side should she dissolve the marriage.
Dr. E bustled into the consulting room, demonstrating a sense
of being busy and harassed by making several telephone calls
before settling in. He implied that the calls were necessary to
temporarily pacify the immature patients who critically depended
on him. Finally he was free to officiously instruct me on his own
marriage by giving me the "facts";
A doctor was on the "firing line" every day making crucial
decisions. Women (not just his wife) cannot understand such
pressures so they fail to exempt him from other responsibilities.
He was a ..take charge" guy by day and would not abide coming
home to be "pussy whipped" into submission. Although distant
from his son, he preferred male company and spent his free time
drinking and playing cards with fireman cronies. He admired their
courage and felt they understood the demands to perform to
which men are subject.
Mrs. E patiently sat out her husband's blustering before gently
inserting one detail: Dr. E could be in a most intense rage at her
but should his mother call, he became politeness itself, sparing
mother any trace of fiery temper.

The fragile self~steem of the phallic narcissist renders him

vulnerable to even trivial rejections, especially if he feels sexually
spumed. The previous examples were of men who used their
outstanding work performances as a buttress to this lack of sexual
pride. The final case, although higWy successful at his vocation, is
not driven to put in the long hours and public displays of mastery
as are the others. Rather than feeling sexually alienated, he finds
532/ AVERY

his wife attractive but not enough to satiate his large-scale appe-
tites. Other women, including his daughter, are drafted to compen-
sate for his wife's meager feedings.

The F's
A 40-year-old physicist came to therapy because of his anxiety
reaction to his wife's intention to end their 17-year marriage.
Despite her firmness over this decision and unflagging performance
at work, he saw her as fragile and in need of his continued pres-
ence and nurturance. He was perplexed by his behavior - his
compulsion to have sexual affairs and his physical abuse of his
wife when she made herself unavailable to him. The affairs con-
fused him because he found Mrs. F sexually appealing, although
he wanted intercourse daily and she much less frequently. The
rages flared when his wife spurned a number of his suggestions
that they spend time together. He would like to spend every
waking hour of his free time with her. Immediately after striking
her he felt remorseful, tried to win back her affections, and thus
began another cycle of frustrating courtship, leading to again
hitting her.
He was anxious with both sexes. He did not fully trust the
affection of the women with whom he had affairs and as soon
as he sexually consummated the relationship he wanted to leave.
He had no male friends and feared getting close lest homosexual
overtones surface.
His oldest child, a high school senior, was college-bound. Their
relationship sounded sexually charged. He seemed pleased that
his daughter had innumerable boyfriends and that she was sexually
active. He considered himself a modem parent free of many con-
ventional prejudices. He brought girlfriends home and permitted
his daughter to have intercourse in her room. She discovered,
while her mother was walking out of the home, that she was
pregnant and subsequently sought an abortion.
Dr. F's father was distant and unsupportive, taking a mild inter-
est in the patient only when he proved himself athletically. His
mother, on the other hand, was extremely interested in his sexual
behavior and aroused him by describing a variety of proscribed
activities in detail. One of her primary injunctions was against
extramarital sexual relations. He reported having occasional sexual
fantasies of mother and these were disturbing to him.
 PHALLIC NARCISSISTIC VULNERABILITY / 533

DISCUSSION

That the braggadocio of the phallic character has a compensa-

tory or self-eonsoling motive is immediately apparent to psychia-
trists and laymen alike. The psychoanalyst today is more likely
to describe injuries to phallic self-esteem in terms of the results
for the child's narcissism, identifications, and object relations.
Earlier workers, by contrast, used a narrower concept of castration
anxiety as the motive for the compensatory phallic displays.
Annie Reich's work bridges the older and more recent psycho-
analytic views as she expresses the interplay between specific
threats to the penis and narcissistic injuries in general.

It should be stressed that castration threats, with ensuing overvalua-

tion of the phallUS, represent only the most conspicuous and the most
tangible narcissistic traumata. However, any need for repair or restitu-
tion may be condensed into fantasies about phallic intactness and
greatness. Castration thus is equated with object loss, emptiness,
hunger, bowel loss and dirtiness, while phallic intactness also expresses
the undoing of pregenital losses and injuries. (Reich, 1973)

The sadness invoked in the clinician by these men is, among

other things, a reaction to the many real assets they have and
which they devalue as not grandiose enough to establish their
phallic worth "once and for all." My own metaphor for them is
borrowed from the title of Robert Anderson's play, "I Never Sang
for my Father." The little boy feels he makes an insufficient im-
pression on his distant or skeptical father no matter how hard he
tries to catch his eye. The watch-me-perform phase of exhibition-
ism contains the child's claim that by virtue of his phallic prowess
he is worthy of his father's notice. Failure to win father's involve-
ment not only casts doubt on his budding strength but also
promotes his identification of maleness with coldness and harsh-
ness. This sets the stage for rigid and exacting standards within his
own superego in an identification-with-the-aggressor fashion. Soft-
ness and weakness then is condemned within themselves and
equally tragically in their sons and wives. Less severely rejected
fathers characteristically indulge and simultaneously hold their
sons to exacting standards. They are in a constant oscillation
between seeking a second chance through the child to at last have
a warm father-son relationship and an identification-with-the-
534/ AVERY

aggressor repetition of their own fathers' harshness and aloofness.

Fathers who have been most cruelly spumed play out more of the
repetition and less of the projective identification of the indulging
type.
Daughters are sometimes spared their father's rigidity; if there
are more than one, a daughter might be indulged while another,
like a son, was kept to martinet-like expectations.
Lacking a supportive father to accept the oedipal challenges
without retaliation, the distinction between sadistic wish and
external reality is not adequately made. Rather than proceeding
normally along the lines of identification, the oedipal aims are
massively repressed (and thus retained) along with increased guilt
and retaliation anxiety (Zetzel, 1970, p. 238). By virtue of the
largely unmodified oedipal aims and the concomitant high castra-
tion anxiety, resolution via homosexual submission is more than
usually appealing. According to this analysis the phallic character
is damned if he makes a sexual approach (guilt and retaliatory
anxiety) and damned if he doesn't (I really am a homosexual).
Much of the protesting-too-much and driven quality to the phallic
narcissist's life has been explairied along these psychoanalytic lines
and several of the case studies fit such a model. Most of the men
are sexually alienated from and probably quite frightened of their
wives. Needing to display a nude wife like a trophy and wanting
daily intercourse as well as numerous affairs keep self-doubts
regarding one's masculinity from surfacing. The oscillation be-
tween a frightening oedipal rivalry and the temptation to hand the
women over in submission is hinted at in Mrs. A's account that her
husband is either extremely jealous or he is inviting men over to
view her body.
Another way to understand the alienation in their marriages is
that these men feel defeated from the start with regard to their
(incestuous) sexual aims. Weinberger's phallic narcissistic patients
complain of boredom in their rich and talented lives. From this he
concludes that boredom is the patient's statement of despair that
his libidinal (incestuous) aims can be met. The Icarian imagery in
his patients' fantasy lives refers to the precariousness of their
oedipal aspirations. Half of the men in this group explicitly
identify the tenuousness of their stellar achievements. One ex-
tremely successful man seems like a patient with a traumatic
neurosis in his incessant reliving of a business reversal several years
earlier. The message is clear; like Icarus, great heights for him
entail correspondingly great anxiety about falls.
 PHALLIC NARCISSISTIC VULNERABILITY / 535

Annie Reich describes her patients tying phallic exhibitionistic

wishes to contempt for those felt to be inferior. TIlese men are, in
her view, proving both their superiority and their rivals' inferi-
ority. When this cherished fantasy can not be sustained, the aggres-
sion is turned back on the self and intense hypochondriacal
anxiety breaks out. Two men in this group had frank hypochon-
driacal symptoms; one felt his symptoms destroyed his sexual
drive.
The intense highs when fortune smiles and the despair over
adversity are characteristic of several of the phallic narcissists in
my group, and in the case studies of Reich and Weinberger and
Muller as well. Weinberger attributes the ecstasy to the fantasy
that oedipal aims can be won and the despair or boredom to the
loss of such an illusion. Reich pursued a different line of reasoning
which highlights identification of the self with the idealized phal-
lus (or phallus-bearing father) in the ecstatic phase. The distant
relationship to the unsupportive father leaves the phallic character
with too much aggression to maintain such an identification in a
stable fashion. When the identification breaks down, the sense
of grandiosity breaks down with it and despair and hypochon-
driacal anxiety ensue. The need to escape these painful affects
ushers in a new cycle. Only one of the patients showed a clear
cyclical pattern to his relations which may parallel this mood
cycle. In the last case, Mr. F manifests in relation to both his wife
and his lovers a cyclical course of hopeful courting foIlowed by
disillusionment and rage or withdrawal from his object.
The marital relations of the six men contribute heavily to their
already stringent self-doubts. Their wives feel abused and aban-
doned; underneath a masochistic forbearance they subtly retali-
ate. Often lionized by associates in their prestigious careers, the
men feel merely old shoe at home. The retaliatory contempt that
one wife feels for her husband whose clothes she selects is clear
to the examiner but probably ambiguous (and thus more formida-
ble) to him. In two cases an unconscious transference was estab-
lished between a wife's rejecting narcissistic mother and her
vainglorious husband. Overtly helpless against these powerful
figures, they seek and exploit openings in the vulnerable facade of
their husband's bravado to settle old grudges. Some of these
women have analogous dynamic configurations to the husbands.
Abandonment-sensitive, their worst fears of being left have materi-
alized in their marriages. Like their husbands they use counter-
dependence strategies and attempt to retrieve something of a good
536/ AVERY

mother in their relations to the children. Their sexual identities

are not secure, as one would expect from the negative relations
to their own mothers. Two women seem frankly frigid; another's
compliance with her husband's need for nude-bathing lures to
other men raises questions about her own confidence in her sexual
self-perception. A third woman, a talented weaver, cannot display
her work without severe anxiety. This woman finds her gyneco-
logical visits traumatic.
Parents with impaired marriages have unconsciously looked to
their children to be compensated for satisfactions they could not
obtain from each other (Zinner and Shapiro, 1972). In addition to
experiencing the normal grieving reaction when the children
depart (Anthony, 1970), such parents themselves feel abandoned
and signal their distress in a variety of ways (Berkowitz et aI.,
1974). Ordinarily the marital pair support one another during
the painful departure of their children and reaffirm their com-
mitment to one another in myriad explicit or implicit ways. The
phallic narcissistic parent is deeply wounded by this inevitably
painful stage in family life. Among his stresses is the realization
that he has not conquered time or the aging process; instead he
feels defeated by them. For all their counterdependent protests,
the six men are patently loss-sensitive and react with a sense of
injury when they feel unable to bind objects to themselves, a
doleful repetition of the loss of their fathers.
Depression, paranoia, psychosomatic reactions - sequelae
to the empty nest - have been described, as have acting out
of exhibitionistic or rejuvenation fantasies (Sternschein, 1973).
All of these cases came to psychiatric attention in the setting
of either serious direct threat to the marriage or indirect stress by
virtue of a departing child who appears to have played a suppor-
tive role in the precarious marital adjustment. The long-standing
conjugal alienation and the acute sense of being abandoned
precludes an adaptive response on the part of the phallic narcis-
sistic parent. He can neither support his wife during this transition
from active to attenuated parenthood, nor can he accept her
comfort. The adolescent leaves not merely with the fantasy that
chaos will follow but with the conviction. His prophesy is accur-
ate: the empty nest is too painful to bear and in this setting
symptomatic breakdown occurs.
 PHALLIC NARCISSISTIC VULNERABILITY /537

References

Anthony, E. J. (I 970), The reactions of parents to adolescents and their

behavior, in Parenthood, E. J. Anthony and T. Benedek, Eds., Little
Brown, Boston.
Berkowitz, D. A" R. L. Shapiro, J. Zinner, and E. R. Shapiro (I974), Con·
current family treatment of narcissistic disorders in adolescence, Int.
J. Psychoanal. Psychother., 3,379-396.
Bowen, M. (1960), Family concept of schizophrenia, in Etiology of Schizo-
phrenia, D. Jackson, Ed., Basic Books, New York.
Reich, A. (1973), Pathologic forms of self-esteem regulation, in Psychoana-
lytic Contributions, International Universities Press, New York.
Ross, J. M. (1977), Towards fatherhood: The epigenesis of paternal identity
during a boy's first decade,lnt. Rev. Psycho-Anal., 4,327-347.
Sternschein, I. (reporter) (I973), Panel on "The experience of separation-
individuation in infancy and its reverberations through the course of
life; maturity, senescence and sociological implications," J. Am. Psy-
choanal. Assoc., 21,633-645.
Weinberger, J. L. and J. J. Muller (1974), The American Icarus revisited:
Phallic narcissism and boredom,lnt. J. Psycho-Anal., 55,581-586.
Zetzel, E. R. (1970), The Capacity for Emotional Growth, International
Universities Press, New York.
Zinner, J. and R. L. Shapiro (1972), Projective identification as a mode of
perception and behavior in families and adolescents, Int. J. Psycho-
Anal.• 53,523-530.