“Absent Fathers, Lost Sons: The Search for Masculine Identity” is a book I’m using as a source to bolster my final essay. A big part of my paper is about how fathers help to give us our identity and set the tone for our lives by guiding us in our early experiences. The author Guy Corneau asserts that the last few generations may have had a hard time connecting with their fathers because the fathers were so busy surviving for most of their lives that they never developed much emotional intelligence or the ability to be emotionally vulnerable. The newer generations growing up with more safety and security now rise in Abraham Maslow’s famed “Hierarchy of Needs” to needing love, belonging, self-esteem; things the last generation was arguably not paying as much attention to.

Many people that I know have a hard time connecting with their fathers, usually for similar reasons. As of right now I’m not sure how quantifiable this theory is, but I’m hoping that this book can provide me with some answers. The book presents an interesting theory and I haven’t done enough digging in the book to quite get at Corneau’s full thesis, but I found it to be startlingly close to the points I’m trying to touch in my own writing so I think diving deeper will be worth my time.