Father Hunger names the chronic psychic deficit that arises when paternal presence — whether literal, symbolic, or archetypal — is absent, withholding, or destructive. Within the depth-psychology corpus the term operates on at least three registers simultaneously. At the clinical-developmental level, James Herzog (1980) and Allan Schore locate it in early childhood: rapprochement-age children deprived of paternal contact display heightened ‘father thirst’ or ‘father hunger,’ and Schore argues that in the second year the father becomes a critical modulator of neural arousal structures. At the cultural-archetypal level, James Hollis devotes an entire chapter of Under Saturn’s Shadow to Father Hunger, framing it as the inevitable consequence of industrial modernity’s dismemberment of the male initiatory chain: sons, deprived of tribal substitute fathers, are driven toward pseudo-fathers — prophets, pop stars, ideological systems — or are left to suffer privately in shame. Robert Bly approaches the same phenomenon through the metaphor of the fallen water-table: when ‘father water’ sinks below the reach of most wells, sons must improvise or go thirsty. A productive tension runs through the corpus between those, like Hollis, who insist on the wound’s reality and its archetypal depth, and those, like James Hillman, who warn against romanticising paternal presence and pathologising absence. The stakes are high: unaddressed Father Hunger is shown to generate pseudo-paternal transferences, masculine shame complexes, and susceptibility to authoritarian surrogates.