Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men 0919123643, 9780919123649
Saturn was the Roman god who ate his childern to stop them from usurping his power. Men have been psychologically and sp
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English Pages 143 [148] Year 1994
Polecaj historie
Table of contents :
Introduction ..............7
The Inner and Outer Woman ..............28
Citation preview
Under Saturn's Shadow THE WOUNDING AND HEALING OF MEN
JAMES HOLLIS Author of The Middle Passage: From Misery
to
Meaning
in Midlife
Digitized by the Internet Archive in
2011
http://www.archive.org/details/undersaturnsshadOOholl
Under Saturn's Shadow
Marie-Louise von Franz, Honorary Patron
Studies in Jungian Psychology
by Jungian Analysts Daryl Sharp, General Editor
UNDER SATURN'S
SHADOW The Wounding and Healing of
James
Men
Hollis
For Dad, for brother Alan, for son Timothy, son Jonah, son-in-law Daniel
and for daughter Taryn
Canadian Cataloguing Hollis,
Publication Data
in
James, 1936-
Under Saturn's shadow:
the
wounding and healing of men
(Studies in Jungian psychology by Jungian analysts;
63)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-919123-64-3 1.
Fear.
2.
Psychoanalysis.
3.
Jung, C.G. (Carl Gustav), 1875-1961.
I.
Title.
II.
Series.
BF575.55.F2H65 1994
Copyright
©
152.4'6
1994 by James
C94-930192-2
Hollis.
All rights reserved.
INNER CITY BOOKS Box
1271, Station Q, Toronto, Canada Telephone (416) 927-0355 FAX (416) 924-1814
M4T
2P4
Honorary Patron: Marie-Louise von Franz. Publisher and General Editor: Daryl Sharp.
Senior Editor: Victoria Cowan.
INNER CITY BOOKS was
founded
in
1980
to
promote the
understanding and practical application of the work of C.G. Jung.
Cover: "They Offered
Him
the
10 1/2" X 13 1/2". Copyright
Printed and
bound
in
Crown of
©
Stars," collage,
1993 by Rick Jones.
Canada by
University of Toronto Press Incorporated
:
CONTENTS
Introduction
The Eight 1
7
Secrets
Men Carry Within
The Saturnian Legacy:
1
Tapes, Roles, Expectations
Woman
28
3 The Necessary Wounding: Rites of Passage
62
2 Dragon Dread: The Inner and Outer
4 Father Hunger 5
HeaUng
83
the Souls of
The Eight Secrets
Men
100
1 00
The Mother Complex I Father Task
What is Healings and Who Seven Steps Bibliography
Index
to
Healing
109
the Healer?
Ill
115
136
140
See final page for descriptions of other Inner City Books
12
Remember, you've come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself, only with yourself. Therefore, thank everyone
who
—
GuvdiiQff,
gives you the opportunity.
Meetings with Remarkable Men.
I
Introduction
This book derives from a talk given
at the
Philadelphia Jung Center
was long overdue.
had personally avoided
in April 1992.
That
the topic for a
decade even though men's suffering, aspirations and
talk
my women
healing had progressively occupied
Twelve years ago, the practice to four.
was nine I
believe this shift
and the reasons for
pists,
men's movement. At best
flux.
it is
analysands in
have also contributed
my
a ratio of six
to the rise
of the
much seemed
in
work of scholarship and emotional pop-psych phenomenon I found distasteful.
am very much concerned work
individuals. This
men
to
more men by
a massive
cleansing, at worst a I
see
replicated in the offices of other thera-
is it
I
time as a Jungian analyst.
avoided the topic because so
I
saw
I
of
ratio
to one. Currently
I
with the healing and transformation of
usually so intense, so deeply personal, that
is
often easy to forget the larger worid and the vast social problems
of which
But
it
men
we
are
became
all
a part
and through which we are
increasingly clear to
me
As women have
did overlap and present consistent motifs.
learned before us,
I
began
men is an inescapable
wounded.
all
that the stories of individual
to realize that the collective
experience of
part of their personal history as well.
and woof of private history and public mythology meld
The warp
into the for-
mation of individual character.
By now,
of course, there are
many
of the dilemma of modem men. In
ring.
I
fine
books on various aspects
book
I
consciously and gratefully.
part of the
a different
do not aim
to offer
them and express them
in
them, also,
draw upon I
to
men's scholarthem, integrate
terms that can be apprehended by many.
the clinical experience of
am grateful
are
distill
an original contribution
complex matters and
I
We
draw from them all
ship, but rather to take
Similarly,
shall
community and each of our voices has
at times, directly,
struggle toward
this
men
in therapy.
To
for permission to use their material.
The purpose of Under Saturn 's shadow,
then,
is
to offer a
synop-
8 Introduction
view of men's wounding and healing, and
tic
examine where
to
things stand in this last decade of the century.
But, even more, a sort of confession
many
this subject for
much the
in transition, but
because
into the
my own
avoided speaking out on
I
male gender. For many years
I
I
myself but because
the painter
In focusing
more
them
typical
is,
on men's
more
the
issues,
universal
it is
my
not
it
tude to those
I
be
women who
frightening than In the pages that to time, not
and representative.
a deep debt of grati-
have spoken out, not only
Their cri de coeur has helped
own wounding, and we The example of women struggling
intro-
becomes."^
pain within our sexist culture, but also to free
fully themselves.
bom
intention to minimize the
wounds of women. We of the male gender owe
own
stand in
Tony Berlant observed, "The more personal and
work of art
spective a
it
examples from time
think
I
that
it
I
simply took that accident and
from under the shadow.
shall cite autobiographical
to indulge
where
clear about
consequences for granted and believed
follow,
seemed so
too have suffered from living under
masculine nature. Fate had
liberating to try to step out
As
I
shadow of Saturn and am not always
relationship to
its
—
years, not only because the issues
men
to express their
men
to
be more
look more con-
sciously to their
are
all
better served as a re-
sult.
to free
themselves from the
shadows of the
men to do
collective gives courage
likewise. Unless
continue to
and makes
it
necessary for
men can emerge from darkness, we
wound women and each
other,
be a safe or healthy place. This work
we
shall
and the world can never do, then,
not only for
is
ourselves but also for those around us. In the
middle of the
last
century the Danish theologian Soren
Kierkegaard observed that one could not save one's age, only express the conviction that the public institutions inertial
ciety
1
it
was
perishing.^
and ideologies
momentum that one cannot hope
and
its
gender
Peter Clothier,
roles.
However, the
"Hammering Out Magic,"
^ The Journals of Kierkegaard,
p.
165.
The unconscious
that guide
in
our
lives,
to bring rapid first
requisite
Art News,
p.
forces,
have such
change
is
that
113.
to so-
men be-
Introduction
come conscious of
the fact that they are grievously
unconsciousness of their trauma causes them
women
themselves and
as well.
how men grow
equally
This, then,
is
bring individual that
a
book
men
must transpire
to hate
that
I
and fear each
growing
rage, to participate in a
invite the reader to see
here. For
women,
ability
journey has
fully.
may
many
It is
confess their
wound. in the
journey described
not
we
know
most
are
we do
likely to experience
know
not
down upon our own
to greater
meaning-
will not hurt us; in-
hurts us deeply and, like
then blindly pull the temple
To bring each of us
men in their lives. The mascumany perils. The rigors and tasks
to afflict the
not true that what
we do
to
useful in understanding that strange
passages,
identify are those
deed, what
men
of
in private,
growing conversation with each
him- or herself
may be
ambivalence which seems line
worked through
the description of the struggle with the mother
complex, for example,
we can
in order to
The imagos consciously and uncon-
other, will also help to heal the world's I
other.
awareness and to further the dialogue
for healing.
individual suffering, but the
and
how women
draws on the work of many
to greater
wound
oppress them, and almost
sciously governing our lives can only be
grief
wounded. The
to repeatedly
often puzzle over
men who
could not but grow to hate
9
Samson, we
heads.
consciousness of male transits and
torments, I am obliged to tell male secrets. I reveal them so that women might better understand. Some of these secrets may be new to men themselves, though I seriously doubt that a single male reader
of this book will disagree that they point to his
own
ing,
isolated
and the
The
title
women,
fear,
and frightened
we may
heart. If
at least
we may
end the
carried in
not end the
wound-
isolation.
of this book alludes to the fact that men, as well as
shadow of
labor always under the heavy
conscious,
wounds he has
some
inherited
ideologies,
some
from family and ethnic group, some part
of the fabric of a nation's history and
an oppressive weight on the soul.
its
Men
mythic
soil.
labor under
it,
This shadow
is
oppressed and
10 Introduction blighted in
The
nine.
spirit.
The experience of
definitions of
what
it
weighty shadow
this
means
to
be a
many of men's
better qualities
man
satur-
and
roles
shaming and devaluing
expectations, competition and animosity, the
of
—male —
is
and capacities
lead to the
all
men
crushing weight. This burden has always been there, but today
of courage are beginning to question the necessity of living under Saturn was the
Roman god
god of generativity, he helped create other hand he ries.
His
was associated with
eariier,
his children for
civilization;
a string of dark
Greek incarnation, Cronus, was
he feared their potential; legend
on the
and bloody
bom
sto-
of the male
tells
us he
was "the
devise shameful actions."^ His wife Gaia fashioned a sickle
and induced Cronus
bom fearsome
birth to Aphrodite,
Cronus struck and severed
to attack his father.
From
his father's phallus.
were
eariy
it.
the one hand, as a
Uranus and the female principle Ge or Gaia. Uranus hated
principle
first to
On Roman
of agriculture.
the drops of blood that
giants.
whose name means "bom of the
Cronus-Satum replaced
fell
on the earth
The sperm-flecked, fecundated sea gave his father
foam.'"^
and became a tyrant of equal
magnitude. Whenever he and his consort Rhea produced children, he ate them.
The only
child
who evaded
Zeus led a revolt against the father and a 2^us's triumph to the
rity
the
Cronus-Satum story
—violence
to the principle
As Jung once
noted,
the great capacity for its
civilizing forces
power complex and became
Thus
earth.
many
corruption in the
^ Crowell's
emerged, but he, too,
of eros, to generativity and to the
where power
empowerment
is,
love
pp.
is
is
not.^
Along with
gods dramatize,
that the
Classical Literature, p.
Edith Hamilton, Mythology,
prey
one of power, jealousy, insecu-
power complex. Power
Handbook of
fell
tyrannical.^ is
^ Ibid., p. 41. ^ His oppression of Prometheus and others
^
was Zeus. In tum, ten-year war ensued. With
this fate
we
see
in itself is neutral, but
109.
well
known. See,
for
instance,
75-78.
"Where love
reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power paramount, love is lacking." ("The Problem of the Attitude -Type," Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 7, par. 78) [CW refers to The Collected Works of C.G. Jung] is
CW
Introduction
without eros
it
is
to violent ends.
11
haunted by fear and compensatory ambition, driven
As Shakespeare
observed, "Uneasy hes the head that
wears a crown."'^
Most men through this
history have
grown up under
shadow of
the
Satumian legacy. They have suffered from the corruption of em-
fear, wounding themselves and others. Modmen may feel there are no alternatives, that Saturn's legacy is the em only game in town. I don't believe it is. Under Saturn 's Shadow is offered to the reader in order to identify some of the many ways in which this dark mythos has scarred our souls. My hope is that it might move each person to look within
powerment, driven by
and
to
seek greater personal freedom.
The Eight 1.
Men's
Secrets
lives are as
Men Carry
much governed by
Within
restrictive role ex-
pectations as are the lives of women. 2. 3.
Men's lives are essentially governed by fear. The power of the feminine is immense in
the psychic
economy of men. 4.
Men
collude in a conspiracy of silence
whose aim
is
to
suppress their emotional truth. 5.
Because men must leave Mother, and transcend the
mother complex, wounding 6.
Men's
lives are violent
is
necessary.
because their souls have been
violated. 7.
Every
man
carries a
deep longing for
his father
and for
his tribal Fathers. 8. If
men
are to heal, they
must
did not receive from without.
'^
Henry IV
part 2, scene 3, line 31.
activate within
what they
1
The Saturnian Legacy: Tapes, Roles, Expectations
"Man
is
bom free,
and everywhere he
is in
chains."
Thus began Jean
Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, in 1762.
and
health,
We all are bom
and then
their parents
and
life
bearing the gerai of wholeness
free,
happens. Since children are dependent upon
their culture for the fulfillment
are quickly estranged
from
that natural being.
of basic needs, they
We are all
socialized to
serve and maintain the collective, family stmctures and social institutions that
have a
life
of their
own but require
the repeated sacrifice of
the individual to sustain them. In the texture of our bones, in the fabric of our nerves, in the cor-
ridors of
the
a
memory, we
carry that precious child
young James Agee, did not
summer night, and wonder at
ing the large questions before
lie
the mystery of it?
Who
still.
of us, like
out on the grass, under the stars of
"We
it all,
are talking
evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that successfully disguised to myself as a child. "^
As
the child intuit-
now I
of
summer
lived there so
the big folk
came
out after dinner, adjusted the bell spray of the sprinkler, rocked on the creaking
porch swing, the child
we were
drifted off into reverie
until,
Sleep, soft smiling, draws
me
unto her: and those receive me,
who
one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me
quietly treat me, as will not, oh, will
who
I
am.^
Agee's remembrance of things past each of us
^A 9
Death
Ibid.,
p.
—
the
wonder of being on
in the Family,
p.
11.
15.
12
is
this
replicated in the lives of
spinning earth, the vague
The Saturnian Legacy 13 angst-laden mists that hover about the path into the future and
joy of
life
coursing through our veins.
heaviness, the
body ache,
bone? What happened in
and
in the
work.
to
lives
but
to that child, afraid
gossamer dreams
He
still,
did
it
Why the
go?
and
the soul fatigue, the ennui of brain
moments of spontaneity,
still
And where
in "a lonely
that slip
of
full
itself?
the
still
He
lives
impulse of delight,"!^
from awareness as we head off
but very deep within, and he
is
weary and
heavily laden with the Saturnian shadow.
me
Let ther
with a personal example. Once in awhile
illustrate
would laugh, or make
came
a joke, or even whistle.
when he
to realize that
however, even then,
I
Even
good
his
when he
as a child
whistled
it
was not joy time but dark
efforts notwithstanding,
to the Great
I
knew
lost his
The
which he responded then and
for the rest of his
Later,
day
at
when
I
time. All
business in agricultural equipment due
'29.
interests
began
things were difficult.
west even before the crash of
own
I
his formal education in the eighth grade
Depression and the failure of the farms that
to sacrifice his
I
recognized an heroic impulse on his part. To
My father had had to end because his father had
fa-
whistled things were very dark indeed;
invoke the clich6, he was whistling in the dark. After awhile to realize that
my
and work
clear
message life,
to
hit the
Mid-
my father,
was
that
to
he had
to support his people.
entered the picture as the elder child, he worked
all
Allis-Chalmers on the assembly line building tractors and
earth-moving equipment, and on nights and weekends he drove a
was
truck and shoveled coal into people's homes. In later years he
promoted, line,
ironically, to the position
with the power to
had screwed up. In
He could analyze For
fifty
tell
his years there
the problems
years he
of "analyst" on the assembly
college-educated engineers where they
he had learned the whole system.
and became a trouble-shooter.
showed up every Friday with
paid, or almost paid, the bills outstanding.
as
my
best friend Kent sometimes did, but
10 W.B. Yeats,
lected
"An
Poems of
Irish
W.B.
I
We
paycheck
knew even
Airman Foresees His Death,"
Yeats.
his
that
never went hungry,
line
then that
11,
in
my
The Col-
14 The Saturnian Legacy father worried that
we would. And I
my
also received
message from him, clearly and irrevocably,
first
man meant to
be a
that to
Saturnian
work always, any work which supported those for whom one was responsible. It meant that personal satisfaction was set aside before fidelity to that enormous responsibility. Years later, work.
It
when I
meant
woman
a
"Here
said,
to
asked
one
lies
this injunction that
and
to
me what I wanted inscribed on my tombstone, who could be counted upon." So powerful was
my
father,
be memorialized for
Years
later,
and
later
was prepared
I,
when I wrote
a note to
my
so well because
on
father
he responded across the gulf between us:
know you boys
to die for
it,
it.
"I
am
his birthday card,
sorry
didn't get to
I
was always working." He was
I
taking on the blame for us growing and developing apart, even as
honored him for
thought
ill
it
meant
to
knew:
I
to us.
I
knew he was
worrying on our behalf, and
of him for his work. But
him. Even then
what
and service
his fidelity
us, suffering for us,
it
also
I
knew
that
I
it
I
serving
never once
did not serve
was
did not serve him, but apparently that
be a man.
During these same formative years Worid War Two was unfolding.
I
saw
the big folk gathered anxiously around the radio to hear of
battles raging in
ones
who were
ball-turret
Europe and the South in
Pacific,
and
on loved
to think
such strange places as Tulagi, Mindanao and
of a B-17
tail
gunner. (All of them did
come
the
back; the
twenty-four year old returned from the Philippines with his hair tally
white and the
The black-out
tail
gunner with a piece of flak
curtains, tearful
obvious anxiety, contributed to ful transpiring,
something
in
good-byes
overheard them whispering atrocity family
who
national
in his leg.)
in train stations, the
my sense of something large and
which we were stories,
to-
all
caught up.
I
awalso
such as the one about the
received a postcard from their son delivered by the Inter-
Red Cross. Under
the
stamp was
written,
"They cut
my
tongue out." Whether such stories were always true or not, the adults
around
me believed they were. That was enough for me. my second irrefutable message about
This constituted
man.
I
firmly believed that
my
fate,
apart from being an
being a
economic
The Saturnian Legacy
was
animal,
place and
grow up and become
to
kill
or be killed, or
awake
nights imagining
Just as
all
my
of the big people
come home
tortured
war times shudders
tainty.
As
a child in the
some
to
foreign
and maimed.
I
lay
fated appointment with such horrors.
who
lived through the Great Depression
were irrevocably scarred and apprehensive, calls
go
a soldier, to
15
anyone who
so, too,
Midwest
I
was
as far
re-
and the uncer-
in recollecting the horror
from the slaughtered
cities as
one could imagine, but the combat zones were everywhere
and we
all
were
afraid.
had not even heard of such places as
I
Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Mauthausen then, but when adult
I
them with
visited
was something
to
my
children.
was not
It
worry about and as a
man I was
I
was an
paranoia; there
all
expected to be
re-
sponsive and responsible. Such were the heaviest of the tapes of
"W's" one might
Saturn, then, the three
men
All
incidents
will recall similar experiences.
where he
Each
war and worry.
will
be able to
something larger than
called to
felt
comprehend. Pulled ineluctably ately
say: work,
relate
his capacity to
into the maelstrom, the child desper-
hopes for information, for modeling, for leadership, for
struction, for help in
in-
coping with that which will shortly confront
and perhaps overwhelm him.
If
one
is
undertake such
to
the
trials,
youth desperately hopes that "they" will take him aside and teach him
what he needs I
recall
to
know.
once glimpsing such mysteries as
survive as a man.
My
I
felt
I
hand and without expression of any kind pulled that
perhaps the big folk did not feel pain as
rather suspected he
had been taught
desperately needed. Perhaps
day "they" would take guessed that
it
needed
father caught a fishhook in the
me
it
it
out.
that mysterious
me how
aside and teach
called puberty,
I
to
his
surmised
I
folk did, but
little
was not too much
might occur when one went
knowing about something
we
in order to
palm of
courage
hope to
that
I
so
some
be a man.
to high school.
I
I
Without
could see that the folks in
high school had bigger bodies than we, that they seemed on the adult side of the great gulf. But, to feel to this day, "they"
means
to
be a
my
surprise,
never took
me
and a disappointment
aside and told
man or how to conduct myself as an adult.
me what
I it
The Saturnian Legacy
16
Today, of course,
know what
did not
I
know means
it
that "they," the tribal elders of
be a
to
man
either.
They
our time,
were
similarly
and could hardly pass on the mysteries and liberating
uninitiated
knowledge they themselves lacked. In
my own
halting fashion,
1
had tumbled
to the necessity
of
of passage from childhood to manhood. Not only are such
about transition from the dependencies of infancy to the
rites rites
self-suffi-
ciency of adulthood, but equally about the transmission of such val-
ues as the quality and character of citizenship, and those attitudes and beliefs that connect a person to his gods, to his society self.
"It
Yet such
rites
and
to
him-
of passage withered and passed away long ago.
has often been said," notes Mircea Eliade, "that one of the charac-
teristics rites
of the
modem world is
the disappearance of any meaningful
of initiation."^^ Even the phrase
"rite
of initiation" or
may not be understood in our time. Ante is a movement in and toward depth.
"rite
of
passage"
Rites are not invented;
they are found, discovered, experienced, and they rise out of
The purpose of
archetypal encounter with depth.
which the
enacts
rite
is
to lead into or
back toward
some aa
the symbolic
that experience of
depth. Obviously rites repeated can lose their capacity to point be-
yond themselves
into that depth,
and they then become empty and
Yet our need for the depth encounter persists. In "The
sterile.
bolic Life,"
Jung speaks of how important
it is
Sym-
for a tribe of Pueblo
Indians to see their rituals as instrumental in helping the sun to
rise.
That gives peace, when people feel that they are living the symbolic that they are actors in the divine drama.
life,
meaning it.
A
one
to
human
life;
career, producing of children, are
thing, that
your
life is
Without meaningful to the soul
—
life
sential, for all
^^ Rites
everything else
rites
is
That gives the only
banal and you can dismiss
all
maya compared with
that
meaningful.^^
we sustain
the
most grievous of wounds
without depth. The idea oi passage
is
similarly es-
passages imply something ending, a death of sorts,
and Symbols of
12 The Symbolic Life,
Initiation,
CW
p.
ix.
18, par. 630.
The Saturnian Legacy
and something beginning, a birth of principle of hfe transit if
we
is
change, and
Only death
we have many
the
is static;
deaths and rebirths to
are to lead meaningful lives. ^^ Initiation implies entry
something new, something mysterious.
into
Given the our culture,
fact that rites it
rites offered.
now
of passage have largely disappeared from
behooves men For what
to reflect as individuals
on what those
not available through our culture
is
we
are
obliged to find for ourselves. Despite the variety of cultures,
and specific
local content, the archetypal stages of
sage were remarkably similar. tuited the ity,
sorts.
1
It
seems
rites
of pas-
our predecessors had
in-
importance of such separations and evolutions of personal-
and they collectively grasped
sary.
that
such
The
were neces-
that these processes
and decisiveness of such
duration, intensity
rites
were
direct proportion to the difficulty of truly leaving childhood
growing up. As few
in
grow
up,
it
may
profit us to reflect awhile
on the stages of initiatory experience. Again, what is left
and
our culture have managed, psychologically
speaking, to separate, to
by our culture
in
to us to
do as
individuals.
is
We
not provided us
cannot avoid the
task through ignorance, for otherwise the developmental process,
becoming a man, remains undone.
Those patterns of passage may be summarized While the content of each stage varied according
in six stages.
to local
custom, the
stages themselves were explicit or implied in the various cultural patterns.
The
first
stage of passage
from the parents
was never night,
in order to
separation, physical separation
begin the psychological separation. This
a matter of choice for the boy. Often, in the middle of the
he would be "kidnapped" from his parents by the gods or the
demons, the older men of the faces.
was
tribe
who wore masks
or painted their
These masks moved them from the familiar realm of neighbors
or uncles to the status of gods or archetypal forces.
The abruptness,
even violence, of the separation, was a reminder
that
no youth would
voluntarily relinquish the comforts of the hearth.
Its
warmth, protec-
^^ See
my
book, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife.
The Saturnian Legacy
18
and nourishment create an enormous gravitational
tion
main by the
hearth, literally or figuratively,
is
to
To
pull.
re-
remain a child and
to
forswear one's potential as an adult. Accordingly, the second stage of the passage was death. The boy
would be literal
be
some
buried, passed through a dark tunnel, plunged into
or symbolic darkness. While the experience would of course
terrifying,
what the youth was undergoing was the symbolic death
He was experientially suffering the loss of home again." It was the loss of innocence,
of childhood dependency. the hearth.
"You
can't go
the loss of the Edenic connectedness of childhood. In "dying," the child
"wakes
to the
farm forever fled from the childless land," as
Dylan Thomas expressed If
there
is
death, then,
it.^"^
must follow. So, the
life
third stage
ceremony oi rebirth. Sometimes a name change accompanied birth, reinforcing the
Roman
its
return to
Catholic confirmation and Jewish bar
and bat mitzvahs are survivors of these historic
The
a
emergence of a new being. (Christian baptism
obviously symbolizes such a death-rebirth motif through the umbilical waters.
was
this re-
rites.)
fourth stage of initiation typically involved the teachings, im-
parting such knowledge as the youth
would
require in order to func-
tion as
an adult. The teachings were of three different kinds. Practical
skills,
such as hunting, fishing, defense and herding were
for the nascent
privileges
man was
and
similarly transmitted.
mysteries, so that the tual
to help sustain
and protect
responsibilities of adulthood
And,
lastly, there
critical,
his society.
was an
introduction to the
young person might have some sense of
grounding and participation in the transcendent realm.
our gods?" "What sort of society, laws, ethics,
bestow?" Locating the person
in a
The
and citizenship were
spiri-
"Who
are
spirit gifts,
did they
mythic context bestowed
identity,
gave a sense of the greater framework
in
which he
participated,
and
deepened the soul of the youth.
The
fifth
stage might be characterized as the ordeal.
the practices might vary, but the
14
"Fern
Hill," in
Collected Poems,
boy was required
p.
180.
The content of
to suffer a separa-
The Saturnian Legacy tion
from the comforts and protections of the hearth.
more about cruelty
was
this later,
in fact a
modems
but what strikes us
much
will say
I
19
as gratuitous
wise perception that such suffering quickened
comes from
consciousness. Consciousness only
some form of suffering
—
suffering; without
physical, emotional, spiritual
—we
are con-
tent to rest easy in the old dispensation, the old comforts, the old de-
pendencies.
The second reason
for such suffering, frankly,
help inure the boy to the actual rigors of
soon enough. While seeming barbarous cumcision and
ritual scarification
life
to us,
was
to
he would experience
such practices as
cir-
not only signaled the sacrifice of
the comforts of the flesh
and childhood dependencies, but were also
a sign of election into the
company of initiated
adults.
Perhaps most significantly, the ordeal usually involved some form of isolation, a retreat to a sacred space away from the community.
The
essential part of being
an adult means not only that one can no
longer turn backward to the protection of others, but that one must learn to
he
is
draw upon inner resources. No one knows he has them
obliged to use them.
The
natural world
dark and
is
until
of
full
strange animals and demons, and the confrontation with one's fear a
moment of decisive
to a central truth, that
the journey alone within, or
months tion to
we
significance. Ritual isolation
no matter how
and must learn
to
tribal
depend on
his wits, his
we
life,
Often the
are
on
name
initiate
spent
Dream, a communica-
alone, waiting perhaps for the Great to his true
an introduction
draw strength and solace from
will not achieve adulthood.
from the gods as
is
our social
is
or proper vocation.
He
learned
courage and his weapons, or he perished.
Upon
returriy
the last stage, the
These
rituals
of passage were elaborate, wisely so, for they were
boy was an
extensive in direct relationship to the
namely the enormous
pull
adult.
power of
toward dependency
the
and powerful emotional experiences are required ertial gravity.
No one
in his right
mother complex,
in all
to
mind would
of
us.
Elaborate
overcome
hence lethargy, fear and dependency dominate, or threaten lives
of us
boys than
all.
In traditional cultures the rites
for girls, for girls
were expected
this in-
willingly separate, to, the
were more elaborate
for
to leave their personal
.
20 The Saturnian Legacy mothers but
back
circle
to the hearth. ^^
Again, the
rites
of separation
were decisive and powerful for boys, not only because of the power of the mother complex but because boys were expected to separate
from the natural world, the
of
life
an
instinct, for
artificial,
man-made
world of culture.
Economics, for example, paychecks, stock options
man's
Food
life
these are concepts
depends and upon which much of
in the
mouth or hunger
checks or bonuses are tual
—
a wholly artificial construct.
is
back
settle
sary, then, to bridge the
powerful as his
the traditional rites of passage
was neces-
huge gulf between childhood and adulthood,
instinctual life
self-sufficiency of
at least as
instinc-
into unconsciousness.
The elaborateness of between boyish
wampum,
To separate a child from the
world requires a numinous construct
urge to
upon which much of his soul is projected.
are instinctual experiences;
artificial.
Money,
manhood.
and dependency and the independent If
boy experi-
the rites worked, the
enced an existential change; he died as one being and became another. But, as tential
feel like a
all
know, such
man?" chances
threatening.
define
we
rites
today are missing, such exis-
transformation driven underground.
what
He it
will
means
to
we
ask a man, '*Do you
are he will consider the question silly or
know
sured up to any of his
If
his roles, but
he will neither be able to
be a man, nor will he
own
he has mea-
likely feel
partial definitions. In short, the
wise
el-
ders are gone, lost to death, depression, alcoholism or corporate
boardrooms and golden parachutes. The bridge from childhood
manhood is washed out. As men have no meaningful wise elders to transmit what sarily
had
sentially
lies
to take their clues
of passage available to them, no
on the other
from
side, they
have neces-
societal role expectations
and
es-
hollow role models. All the while, the pain and confusion to
the soul is
^^
rites
to
pushed inward, or acted out
Today the gender expectations
for girls
have exploded and
women
Thus they too need
from
are in-
of passage into adulthood. See, for instance, Sylvia Brinton Perera, Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women. creasingly
free
to
pursue
violently, or distanced
differentiated
lives.
rites
The Saturnian Legacy 21
wisdom and
consciousness. Accordingly, the gap between
ence has been
women
true for
Hence that
as well,
seldom feed the
soul.
the first of the great secrets to be openly
men 's
lives
lives are
as
of women. And
experi-
by outer images, images which, as has been
filled in
much governed by
the corollary
acknowledged
role expectations as are the
do not support,
that those roles
is
is
confirm or resonate to the needs of men's souls. It is
growing awareness of
the
role expectations is
called the
this terrible
and the needs of the soul
discrepancy between
that has
given
men's movement. While no representative
body has emerged (such as
rise to
what
institution or
the National Organization for
Women),
nor has there evolved a clear socio-political agenda, the scattered
men's groups and growing body of awareness that something
movement It's
is
succinctly
is
literature attest to the stirring
terribly
wrong. The need for such a
summarized by John Lee:
an emotional movement, a releasing of the pain and poison
have been holding
in their collective
power oriented
any way, but powerful
in
younger than women. Don't Don't rock the boat. Don't bill
I
in that
it
men not
It is
men and
frees
Die
feel.
Don't grieve. Don't get angry.
talk.
trust other
men. Don't put passion before
paying. Follow the crowd, not your bliss."^^
concur entirely with these sentiments. However, the shadow of
power
inevitably creeps
into
something wild and very deep;
join a group,
would
criticize
those
risk
men have still,
rightly felt a longing
the average
meeting out
feel ridiculous
drum, and will seldom
When
any group, any movement.
overly socialized and domesticated, for
stomachs for centuries.
from the tyranny of the old paradigm of "Don't
their spirits
of
man
will never
in the forest to beat a
being vulnerable with other men.
who have gone into
the forest
I
do not
and wept and raged and
beat the drum, for they have frequently found something needed for their souls.
At the same time such
term relevance as bra burning
women ^^ At
My
activity
now
may have
as
much
long-
occupies in the long march of
toward dignity and equal opportunity. Bra burning was an
Father's Wedding, p. xviii.
The Saturnian Legacy
22
important emotional release, for a few at
more
energies are
working toward
We
are
still
and many
will
nostalgia,
at
to find a
up
even as
We
form of emotional release and a way
son
in
Santa Fe where he
and
living
is
We drove up into the Jemez Mountains, so out on us. We saw owls, deer and two very
artist.
on
When we
a rock.
we
got closer
realized
had legs and two predators were munching on a moose.
from
far
We
suspect that future generations will
impact on the course of history.
my
visited
snowed they would thaw.
I
to
—
little
that the road ran
were
in
man retreats with a sort of bemused we think of the communes of the sixties well in-
large black birds sitting that the rock
and
of wild
this era
struggling to be an far
such
an early stage of understanding men's experience
have
I
my mind
effectively spent in discussion, in court
tended, but having
Recently
but to
cultural change.
share their pain with others. But
look back on
least,
and we joked
civilization
also find the bodies of
that if
two Anglos
returned to the Santa Fe plaza with the
it
suddenly
in the spring
warm
feeling of
having had a primal adventure.
my
Crossing the street
me
and introduced about what
I
son saw a leader of the local men's group
to him.
knew,
Immediately the
who I knew,
if I
man began
quizzing
had drummed, and so on.
I
me felt
myself pulled, involuntarily, into a competitive mood. Then, quite nicely,
he invited
me
to attend a
name-changing ceremony for two
men reaching their fiftieth birthday
the next day.
When
I
said
had
I
to
out of Albuquerque to Atlantic City at 7:30 the next morning, he
fly
said, "I'll
throw a
fast
one
at
you now.
Why
do you spend so
little
time with your son?" I
began
classic I
to say that
I
had
to get
male defense (and also
had finished, saying, "This
"Oh, okay," the
My son and consciousness
I
man
said,
reflected
this
man
for
it;
reality), is
to
but
work
my
to
pay the
bills,
a
son interceded before
his third visit to see
me
this year."
and we parted.
on the encounter and noted how, for
all
the
professed to have, he had negatively charged
me up to feel competitive and I to shame me as a father. He was operating,
the meeting with male issues. fell
back
then he sought
He
set
The Saturnian Legacy 23 I
believe, without conscious malice,
and
may
I
indeed be guilty of
compulsive working and be less than the perfect us
into the trap long prepared for
fell
pose of the men's movement
men against each other, In this duel at high
change
that lasted
fired at
to reinforce these old
reflexes.
not the pur-
complexes,
to set
noon on the plaza fired
in
Santa Fe, no six-guns
and wounds suffered
in
an ex-
as far as memory. A "movement" had, in welcoming me, his complex was triggered and he set
240 seconds but reached back
me up, me in ways
me. Sizing
that stir old passions, old competitive
Then, subtly the shadow problem of power insinuated
and he sought
aimed
is
it
a leader of the
about questioning
self,
men. Surely
as he unwittingly had.
were drawn, but shots were
man who was
both of
father, but
to set
to
him one
shame me
me one down. Imbued
up,
it-
as an absent father. His question as he surely
was
with the precepts of the men's movement, the search for release from
such games, he nonetheless triggered them.
The exchange between us might seem innocuous, and perhaps
make
too
much of
it,
but
I
I
think a slow motion replay allows us to
see the role played by the unconscious, the complexes activated and the reflexive behaviors that is
tie
men
to no- win positions.
an emotionally charged cluster of energy
may
have the power
to temporarily take
Thus, the situation activated the
—
itself
when
We may
or
activated they
over the conscious personality.
two men meeting, sizing each other up
complexes and, against our conscious
out historically -charged roles. this
in the psyche.
not be aware of such psychic charges, but
A complex
On
we played men play out
intent,
the collective level,
competitive and shaming exchange daily, whether in academic or
corporate turf wars or on the high seas and battlefields. In sizing each other up, as
the
power complex
men do when
inevitably surfaces.
part of our psyche with
they meet, the
The shadow
shadow of
represents that
which we may be uncomfortable, or
disdain,
or that threatens ego intentions, but serves as a split-off part of the soul nonetheless.
of integrating
it,
Working with the shadow represents
for
ers or leak out in
what
is
the only
way
not integrated will be projected onto oth-
dangerous behavior. While the encounter of two
24 The Saturnian Legacy
men on the
of Santa Fe
streets
is
hardly an epic confrontation,
problem of power with
constellates the archetypal
all its
still it
attendant
and defenses.
fears
This leads us to the second male secret, that men's lives are essentially
governed by fear
Because men cannot undo what
influences them.
But the healing of a man
shamed by
feeling
women
his fear.
acknowledge
to
in his life is to risk feeling
So
how much
will require that
fear
he cease
have always admired the freedom of
I
their fears, to share
the support of others. For a
have assem-
fragile strength they
bled, they can scarcely admit to themselves or others
man
to so
them, and thereby reap
acknowledge the place of
unmanly and
to
fear
expect shaming by others.
his isolation deepens.
But
Even your women
this secret is out, fellows.
are
on
to you,
indeed they always have been. While researching this book, across an article in the nal:
"Men's Secret
March 1992
Fears:
What
found us out. In essence the fundamental ical
fears, the fear
or psychological
worries
The
I
Home Jour-
Never Tell You." So they have
article correctly identifies
(Notice the latent expression of the twin
is
the Saturnian
shadow
at its
most
—
competition, winners-losers, productivity as the measure
their family.
the fifth phase of the initiatory
trial,
men who doubt
expressed by
How many
films,
their ability to
to
Cape Fear, have
caveman
in us,
defender of the hearth? Indeed,
more
afraid of illness, incapacity
than of death. face of
—
When I have said as much to it
invariably
afraid of the
trial,
men have nodded any of
its
—on
the log-
more frightening than
their heads. Yes, they are
of failing the ordeal, than of death
tence, powerlessness in
many men
and impotence
an audience
absurd, for what could be
rites, is
defend themselves and
from Straw Dogs
confide that they are
stirred this
death?
men's two
of not measuring up and the fear of phys-
measuring up
of manhood. The fear of
ical
came
discovered in childhood, work and war).
fear of not
obvious
trial.
issue of, yes. Ladies
He'll
I
forms,
is
itself.
more
Impo-
worse than annihilation.
Work, war and worry.
Governed as he
is
by
fear,
unable to admit
this to
himself
lest his
The Saturnian Legacy 25 hold on things
unable to share with his comrades
slip,
shamed, a man compensates. The
man who
big house, or big position with a big
some degree over others
for
may
how
plex
No
animal
is
was
ened. Perhaps Freud ual,
that
great American
late
"Thems what
it,
thinks they
the complex; beneath the
is
more dangerous than one
right
when he
said that
or Adler in giving primacy to power, for
all
when
that
is,
com-
fright-
is
things were sex-
eros
is
injured
it
gambit of power.
resorts to the
The power complex drives
surely compensating to
Upscale lunches and power
empowerment. As
Beneath displays of power
lies fear.
title, is
feels.
philosopher Pearl Bailey expressed ain't."
boasts of his big car, or
serve an edifice complex, but they are pathetic sub-
for genuine
stitutes
small he
he be
lest
is
men.
the central force in the lives of
them and wounds them. Out of
their rage they
wound
It
others,
and out of their sorrow and shame they grow more and more distant
from each
bihtating
The
other.
and
repetitive
The cost of this mutual wounding is enormous, Whatever is unconscious is internalized in de-
cyclic.
ways or projected onto
cost of these
governed by
two
others and acted out destructively.
is
men's
secrets, that
role expectations as
ruled by fear,
men and
first
women's, and
that
the pathology of our society.
American men
women. They
are four times
be substance abusers and also four times more
rage,
lives.
male sadness, male
The men's movement is
die,
on the av-
more
likely to
likely to take their
plumb
is
a
welcome response I
Aaron
male
to this suffering,
would not demean But
I
the desire of
believe that ultimately
change comes through the individual. Sharing has is
the depth of
space where they might gather together to share
initiatory, life-deepening experiences.
sonal change
jail.^'^
isolation.
both obvious and hidden.
men to create a safe
^^ See
are secretly
They are eleven times more likely to spend time in
these statistics do not even begin to
which
men
rather easy to discern in the sufferings of individual
erage, eight years before
own And
much
lives are as
primary.
Kipnis, Knights without Armor,
pp.
16ff.
its
place, but per-
26 The Saturnian Legacy Marxists have rightly critiqued the capitalist social structure most of us have grown up serving. Karl Marx, in itarian
who saw
my
view, was a
and subsequently ours, and ex-
the evils of his day,
pressed not only his rage but his vision of the alternative
however, his vision
less society. Sadly,
the
pogroms and
human-
is
—
the class-
repudiated by the gulags,
the thousand reminders that
whosoever ignores the
worth and weight of the individual will only create a new tyranny. In
Marx
seeking to improve the material status of man, at the same time
devalued his spiritual status and thus created an edifice that would ultimately collapse.
As we were told two thousand
we do
years ago,
not live by bread alone. Therefore, although valuing social action, tions
end by serving
their
own
men's movement,
three are gathered, there too
Accordingly, this book
women who
is
is
know
that all institu-
survival and not the cause for
they were founded. Similarly, although intentions of the
I
I
I
also
which
value the necessity and the
know
that
wherever two or
shadow of power.
the
written for individual
men and
for the
stand in relationship to them. Join groups, share with
other men, but
it is
in the
man must be bom.
modem
only through the capacity to discem what
It is
forces course within
smithy of the private soul that the
him
that will
determine a man's retum, or not,
to the organization, to the marriage, to the society at large, as part
of
the solution.
Jungian analyst James Hillman has recently criticized the long struggle for consciousness in an iconoclastic book. We've
Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and His point
is
valid, but
cacious than the
I
the
World
Is Getting
believe that group action can be no
sum of individual
Had
Worse.
more
consciousness brought to
a
it.
effi-
Men
of good will have created bureaucratic monsters and institutions to torture others,
spreading a terrible darkness. In his 1937 lectures at
made an indelible point: shadow consciously, for
Yale Jung
of the
such a
and
if
man knows
that
he only learns
whatever
to deal
thing real for the world.
He
the
is
new man must bear the burden
wrong in the world is in himself, own shadow he has done some-
with his
has succeeded in shouldering at least an
The Sa turnian Legacy 2 7 infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social
problems of our
day. These problems are mostly so difficult because they are poi-
soned by mutual projections.
How
can anyone see straight when he
does not even see himself and the darkness he unconsciously carries with him into
all his
dealings? ^^
Thus, in the following pages,
I
invite individual
those forces that contend within them.
ourselves society
is
is
What we do
men
projected onto our surroundings, and so the
the aggregate of
what
is
unconscious
to reflect
on
not understand in
in
sum
each of
of our us. In
show how we are all personally affected by the same issues. The more fully we understand how we relate inwardly to the feminine, the more able are we to disentangle the skein of relationship with an actual woman. In understanding the necessary wounding of our sensibilities, we can sharing the dreams and dilemmas of individual men,
suffer the world's monstrous pathologies without
I
become monsters
ourselves. In acknowledging our deep hunger for the tribal fathers,
we can more us
The
roles
all.
We
nearly parent ourselves.
and expectations, the shadow of Saturn,
can continue to blame "them"
invented and institutionalized
change.
We can
all
of
rest heavily
on
—those who mysteriously —but then nothing
will
this
no longer wait for something
to
change "out
there,"
we must change ourselves. AH we men often have trouble internalizing our
even with a men's movement afoot;
change
starts within,
experience.
So
but
the task
is difficult,
but
it is
far preferable to living
forever under Saturn's shadow.
18 "Psychology and Religion," Psychology
and
Religion,
CW
11, par.
140.
2
Dragon Dread: The Inner and Outer Woman
The Greeks thought of Eros
as a god, oldest
the gods, at the beginning of
all
and yet youngest of
all
things and ever-renewing, ever-
emergent. Eros driven underground becomes rage, and great violence ensues. Eros differentiated builds cathedrals and writes
phonies.
We
have too narrowly confined the work of
the bounds of sexuality. Surely he
by forces deeper than
is
this
present there, but
we
sym-
god within are
moved
more mysterious than
sex, longer than love,
the beloved.
One
of the best places to discern what Blake called "the lineaments
of desire"i9
is in
the poet.
And
perhaps no
modem poet
has taken us
deeper than Rainer Maria Rilke. In his third "Duino Elegy" Rilke tracks the dark presences that course within to the
men, contrasting songs
beloved with "that hidden guilty river-god of the blood":
How he devoted himself— Loved what was this
Loved.
.
inner in him, the wilderness of within,
whose mute topple
jungle inside him, upon
his heart stood, light-green.
Loved. Left
it,
leapt
beyond his own roots into enormous origin, where his little birth was already outlived. Loving, he had his descent into an older blood, into ravines, where what was dreadful lay, still fat with the fathers.
And everything terrible
knew
Yes, what
him, blinked, appeared informed.
was
horrible smiled.
.
Seldom
How should
he not love
He
it,
since
it
smiled
before you, for even then, as
dissolved in the water that
^^
.
have you smiled so tenderly, mother.
"A Question Answered,"
in
at
him.
loved
you carried him,
makes what
is
it
it
was
sprouting
light.
The Norton Anthology of Poetry,
28
p.
508.
Dragon Dread 29 See,
we don't
mounts
love, as flowers do, out of a
where we
single year; into
immemorial sap
love,
our arms.^^
The man sees
the beloved, but can her visage alone so deeply stir?
Behind her stands
mother who made harmless "the nightly
his caring
frightening room." Yet even she serves to front for, mediate, the
deeper presence of "the torrents of ancestry." derness of within," the "jungle inside."
"where what was dreadful
lay,"
He
Down
senses "the wil-
there,
he knows,
something waits and smiles
at
This primal encounter lives eternally in the soul of man, fear
and tenderness.
The beloved
the veins. is
not
only
its
When we stirs
still
him. full
of
love, then, timeless juices rise through
and activates
all this
fear
and
desire, but
carrier.
Rilke intuitively grasped
what Jung has described,
that life
is
en-
acted on three levels simultaneously: consciousness, the personal un-
conscious and the archetypal or collective unconscious.
much
consciousness
is
so hard
won and
because
But the ego, the center of consciousness, an immense ocean.
when we
vest
haps, that peating:
We
all
know
it
is
constitutes the
known.
a thin wafer floating on
this, intuitively
and
experientially,
sleep or are stormed by uncontrollable complexes. But
seldom give
sufficient
what we do not know
will not hurt us. This is
what we do not know, controls
Beneath ego consciousness
member them but
they
lies
is
is
the personal unconscious, the
is
birth.
We may
Of
all
how large the original how long its influence,
the experiences of
is
sum
not re-
the realm of the personal
a function of
most important we ever have
re-
an emotionally charged experience,
load, as in the case of a trauma, or
case of a relationship.
worth
us.
remember us. This
complexes. Again, a complex
power of which
we
weight to what courses within, thinking, per-
of those things that have transpired since our
the
We
significance in our status as conscious beings, perhaps because
life,
affective
as in the
normally the
of our mother. Certainly other expe-
riences and relationships have an influence, but typically the experi-
^ Duino
Elegies,
p.
47.
30 Dragon Dread ence of the mother
psychologically determinative.
is
The personal mother is
the source
from which we emerge, having
shared her blood, floated in her amniotic seas and resonated to her
Even after some way every
we
neurological network.
separation,
reconnection. In
act of life thereafter is eros seeking
reflexively long for
reconnection through other objects of desire, through sublimation, or
even through projection onto the cosmos
from Latin
gion,
religare,
(hence the word
itself
reli-
"to bind back to or reconnect with").
Moreover the personal mother
the protector, nourisher
is
and primary
mediator between the fragile child and the larger world. (As Rilke
She
noted, she mediates the darkness of the child's imaginal terrors.) is
the Primal Object standing over us, around us, and between us and
the world. Is
it
any wonder
that her significance
looms so large?
One's mother incarnates and models the archetype of fathers contribute their
chromosomal
heritage, the
life.
mother
is
Though
the place
of origin, locus of parturition and omphalos of our world. Such "torrents of ancestry" are entrusted to the fragile vessel of a single
person, a
woman, who phenomenologically communicates who,
tery of life itself and
and the
child,
embodies
life force.
by
the child
all
in the specific relationship
The mother's biochemistry
in utero, the treatment
human
and how we are
life
emerged from
—
her is
we
the
of
being.
How we
we
are related to those origins
comprehend ourselves and our place
in the cos-
Not
share most of our early, formative days and years with
more so
replicated
still
to
own
the primordial seas, so
are initially construed through the mother-child encounter.
only do
to
his mother, her affirmations or denials of his person-
emerged from umbilical waters.
mos
mys-
messages about our relationship
sorts of
hood, are primal messages to boys about their Just as
the
between mother
if
fathers are distant or not there at all
by teachers and other caretakers who
primarily female.
Hence
the
in
—but her
major influx of information
ceive about themselves, and what
life is
about,
role
our culture are
men
re-
comes from woman.
Whence derives the third great secret men carry, namely that the power of the feminine is immense in the psychic economy of men. As one's personal mother is the bearer of the archetype of life, so
Dragon Dread 31
we
experience both a collective and a uniquely personal message.
The mother complex, is in
us
all. It is
that
is,
the affectively charged idea of mother,
experienced as the longing for warmth, connection
When
and nurturance.
one's
experience of
initial
needs, or largely so, one feels that one belongs in
life,
place where one will be nurtured and protected.
Where
experience of the
feminine was
racinated, disconnected.
large.
One's
entire
is
that here is a
the primal
conditional or painful, one feels de-
Such an ontological wound
body, burdens the soul and
met these
life
is
felt
in the
frequently projected onto the world at
Weltanschauung can derive from
this largely
un-
conscious, phenomenological "reading" of the world.
An example comes thia
was bom
in
to
mind of a woman
Germany during
logical mother, a gifted
I
saw
analytically.
Her
the early days of the war.
and sensitive
artist,
Cynbio-
committed suicide when
the child was two. Her biological father served in the Wehrmacht and was captured in North Africa. When he returned from captivity he
did not feel up to parenting and turned his daughter over to his wife's sister;
he died a year
later in a cycling accident.
The stepmother had only never bonded with her.
As
reluctantly accepted her sister's child
a child,
Cynthia
stole chocolate
from stores even though her family was upper middle
and
and toys
class.
When
she reached puberty Cynthia became severely anorexic and spent her
adolescence in various clinics and hospitals. in her thirties.
threatening.
Her eating disorder
I
met her when she was
persisted but
was no longer
life
She was now bulimic, binging on chocolates and vomit-
ing perhaps twice a week. She taught foreign languages in her
home
where she could control her environment and had had only a few brief, transient
About
ten
romantic relationships.
months
into therapy Cynthia
entered her apartment, stolen the doll she the street. In the
napper.
dream she
felt
dreamt
would give
tasks: 1)
make
the doll
love with a
fled
had
down
extreme anxiety and pursued the kid-
When she caught up with
the witch she tried to
back, but the witch refused. Cynthia pleaded and that she
that a witch
was holding and
back fat
if
buy the
doll
the witch replied
Cynthia would perform three
man, 2) deliver a public
lecture at
32 Dragon Dread Ziirich University,
and 3) go back to Heidelberg and have a sit-down The dream ended with Cynthia sadly ac-
dinner with her stepmother.
knowledging
would
consciously, she
This dream
mother
is
felt
at the three levels
tected her,
at
common symbol
As
which had,
example of how we
The
simultaneously.
who might
all
experience the
loss of her personal
of the negative mother and
it is
levels.
became
that existential angst
that experience of
a defense against
triple task
life,
later bulimia,
against risk and
was a projection of
onto food.
imposed by the witch, who
is
experienced as such
because she incarnates the destructive experience of Cynthia's
she
frozen.
is
trau-
A witch is
figuratively, stolen Cynthia's inner child, her doll.
a result her life
would represent
too,
also have nourished and pro-
both the personal and archetypal
commitment. Her anorexia, and
The
beyond her powers. So,
and the experience of a most ambivalent surrogate,
matized Cynthia
life
the performance of such tasks
intimidated by the tasks.
a compelling
mother, the loss of a father
a
knew
while she
that,
free her captive doll, they lay
a symbolic liberation of those areas
She was not
to
make
love with a
seek to overcome her estrangement from her repository of the archetype of nature. She
was
in her life
life,
where
man literally, but own body, the local
fat
to deliver a lecture in
order to overcome the agoraphobic defense against contacts with others.
And
she was to meet with the metonymical representative of
her wounding, the stepmother, over, of
mmer-mater wound might be Such child
is
a
dream represents
bom whole,
all
places, a meal,
the effort of the psyche to heal
but then
where the
healed.
is
wounded by
life
events,
itself.
The
each wound
spUtting off some natural truth and producing a concomitant strategy for survival.
known suffers.
how
Such a
split
and attendant
more popularly
as neurosis, the split between soul and society that each of us
Again, while the dream
is
the three levels of being are
initial
reflex is
that of a
woman,
it
illustrates well
engaged and carry the
trace of the
encounters with the mother world.
At the conscious
level
Cynthia lived a
life
of self-protection. At the
level of the personal unconscious, her eating disorder
was
a
symboHc
Dragon Dread 33 expression of her ambivalence toward food, the projection of the
mother-wound onto matter (from Latin mater, mother). At the archetypal level Cynthia suffered estrangement
others because the
The
nated.
first
from the body and from
encounters with the Other had been contami-
strategically
assembled reflexes that constituted her per-
immense importance of
sonality testify to the
the primal encounter
with the Other, that the personal mother, for good or
mediates.
ill,
Sadly, but inevitably, that relationship with the primal Other
paradigmatic for the child, fered to define both self
primal Other
is
more
the child will feel trusting of the
becomes
who expands upon the datum fate has and world. When the encounter with
of-
the
consistent and nurturant than Cynthia's was,
more grounded
in his or her
own
and more
reality
world around. As Freud once observed, the child
who
has the mother's devotion will feel invincible.^i But, alas, the devoted blessing of the mother can be a curse as well.
Many women have sought
their sons.
This
is
to live out their unlived life
the source of so
women,
jokes. In fairness to such
many "My
their
through
son, the Doctor"
animus development
inner masculine principle having to do with assertiveness,
—
the
compe-
—
empowerment has often been blocked by cultural gender limitations. Hence they have tried to live out their empowerment vitency and
cariously through their sons. result
that
The psychic
inflation in
men
from having a devoted mother can even drive them
by themselves they might never have
Jung suggested unlived
life
that
attained.^^ is
the
of the parent. Thus, the undeveloped animus of the
the hulking defensive in
may
to heights
perhaps the greatest burden for a child
mother often drives men,
zooms
that
silently,
unconsciously, to achieve.
Even
end mouths "Hi, Ma!" when the portacam
on him on the
sideline.
There
is
nothing intrinsically wrong
man motivated by a strong mother presence. Yet we must how and to what extent he leads his own life if he is carrying the
with the ask
^^ Ernest Jones, The Life
and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1, p. 8. ^^ See Mercedes Maloney and Anne Maloney, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, a study that traces the role of the mother in the lives of many fa-
mous men.
34 Dragon Dread
men are
projections of his parent. If
very
make conscious
least,
to
be liberated, they must,
the values they serve.
Behind such blind ambitions men are driven
power of our her
mother complex. Often the
the
own
life,
at the
has not developed her
woman who own animus,
her son under her psychic dominance. Let
ways by
in darker
me
the
has not lived tries to
keep
mention two worst-
case but factual examples.
A former colleague on a college campus early fifties, took in his
As
never married but, in his
mother who had been
bom in the
Old World.
she grew older she grew increasingly senile and wandered the
campus on her own. On two occasions she locked her arms hallway doors and blocked the entrance.
done
she replied, "I
this,
Sammy." She had managed married for the
first
am
When
keeping the
asked
why
from
girls
in the
she had
my
poor
her project very well and her son only
time a few months after her death. So great was
the enthrallment of the
complex
that a brilliant scholar
could not free his psyche until he was freed by
and teacher
fate.
Another man, who was having considerable
difficulties in his
marriage, finally mustered the strength to ask his mother to butt out
work out his relationship with his wife without He showed me her reply on a small piece of paper:
and allow him terference.
to
in-
Dear Son,
You
never know how you have broken your mother's heart. Of men who could have been your father, you will only have
will
the ten
one mother. have
I
do not have long for
this earth,
love,
Some day ter
I
hope
that
I
can
belongs.
Your Mother
there will be a Mother's Hall of
It
Fame
hits all the buttons: guilt for ruining
tion, denigration is
but
my son back before I die.
in
which
this let-
her animus projec-
of the man's father and the implication that the son
responsible for her well-being. Rather than laugh at her overt
heavy-handedness, or rage
"How," he asked, "am
I
at the
to write
manipulation, the
back?"
He was
man
felt
crushed.
so completely under
her psychic influence that he could not see through her; he could only passively suffer. Moreover, he had been so stripped of his
own em-
Dragon Dread 35
powerment Her
note,
he could not hold his half of the marital relationship.
that
and
Again, as Jung noted, Similarly,
whose need
was not about love but about power. where power is, love is not.
their relationship,
I
for
mothering
is
so extensive that they
dissatisfied with their wives.
want
be mothers
to
men in therapy are doomed to be
have seen a considerable number of
to their
While
husbands,
it
clear that
is
it is
women do
also clear that
not
many men
seek in their wives the sort of unconditional acceptance and nourish-
ment associated with
men
positive mothers. Indeed,
I
have seen many
stuck in marriages that were dreadful for various reasons but
they were unable to countenance the idea of leaving. Departure held all
the terrors of the child leaving
in particular, is freighted
and nurturance. As so
boys find
little
home
women grow weary
it
unknown.
for the
Sexuality,
with the infantile need for bodily contact of taking care of
little
boys,
home and grow to show the way.
harder and harder to leave
since neither father nor the fathers are available
up,
When men feel the push-pull of the mother complex they are apt to confuse that power with the outer woman in their life. Just as they often regress in intimate relationships, ner,
and oppress women, as fear of their
women Fear
making a mother of
their part-
unconsciously demanding she be "the good breast," so they fear
is
is
own
if
by controlling them they might master the
undertow. The sorry history of men's treatment of
stark testimony to this.
One oppresses what one
responsible for the oppression of
ing, the latter
women and
most notably by young men insecure
chological reality.
The
there
in their
fears.
gay bash-
own
psy-
resistance President Clinton encountered in
proposing to end the ban on homosexuals
was not because
for
in the
American
military
were no homosexuals already serving bravely
and honorably, nor because regulations regarding sexual harassment
were not already
in place, but
because of the macho man's fear of his
own feminine side. Machoism
is
in direct proportion to
together of fearful tacit
men
is
man's
admission of the power of the feminine
tions of
macho
fear,
and the banding
the breeding ground of violence and the in their lives. Vast bas-
mentality remain in contemporary society, perhaps
36 Dragon Dread
none more regressive than the military. Possibly, in order to do the work of killing, a man has to override every principle of relatedness within him; he can
ill
afford to pay attention to doubt or to the eros
he knows what the Greeks
principle. In his frightened heart
clear long ago, that in the
But he
dite (Venus).
onto
Because
women
man
is
power because,
sadly, he has not
comfortable with his feminine
to feel
his fear is only partly conscious,
and gays, among others.
macho man remains all
end Ares (Mars) was no match for Aphro-
will fight her
yet learned that to be a side as well.
a
made
little
it is
unreasoning
In his
projected fear, the
boy just as much as the man who expects
women to mother him. Both of them have unwittingly succumbed power of
to the
mother experience and denied
the
that
same
large
power within themselves. Surely the greatest tragedy for ciple
is
that their fear alienates
ciple of relatedness, feeling
alienation their
from
men
in regard to the
them from
their
and connection
own
feminine prin-
anima, the prin-
to the life force.
from other men as
self obliges alienation
This
well. Often
only connection with each other comes through superficial talk
about outer events, such as sports and Recently
was
I
in a
A man swaggered in dumbest
my
thing,
politics.
neighborhood barbershop getting
and announced
wife just said
I
at the
my
hair cut.
top of his voice, "The
should go see a therapist!"
No
one responded. He thought no one had heard him so he repeated the sentence, but
still
no one answered.
In the past, perhaps, he
have evoked the anticipated Greek-chorus response that
was
the
further into
dumbest thing anyone ever heard. Apart from slouching
my
thinking what
I
chair,
I
concluded that the others were probably
was: "She's got a good idea there, buddy." In retro-
spect the scene, typical of thousands like but
I
As
it,
seems
rather amusing,
believe that beneath the man's attempt to find reassurance in a
male enclave crouched
^^
would
that, yes, surely
his deep-seated fear.^^
on a Super Bowl Sunday, I read in the newspamost common day of wife-battering. If the allegation is even partly true, it is shameful and illustrative of the fear men dump on women on this most macho of days. I
write these sentences
per that today
is
the single
Dragon Dread 37
Guy Comeau
Jungian analyst
from
own
their
points out that
men grow
bodies as well, for they associate their corporeal real-
with the early, primal contact with the mother.^^
ity
seldom held and hugged by
As
they were
their fathers, they correlate matter
with
men
visit
mother, and disconnect from their bodies. For this reason their physicians only
one reason
alienated
—
one quarter as often as do
why men die
earlier. Yes,
it
true that
is
women perhaps men feel obliged
to overrule their bodies frequently in physical or cerebral labor, but
they do so at their
but
we
peril. It is
easy enough to blame outer conditions,
collude in our self-alienation because of this deep ambiva-
lence toward the mother-materia that clothes our bones and sinews.
The
classical story of the archer Philoctetes is illustrative of the
dilemma of modem men. His
story
comes
to us
from Greek mythol-
ogy, in a play by Sophocles in 409 B.C.E. In return for his funereal service to the hero Heracles, Philoctetes
which shoots poisonous arrows to the plains
wound
of Troy Philoctetes
is
that never is
bitten
given the fabulous
bow
miss their mark. En route
by a serpent. The resulting
will not heal. Finally his shipmates can
no longer stand the
odor of the suppurating bite and his cries of anguish, so they aban-
don him on an
island for nearly ten years while the blood bath at
Troy continues. After a prophecy that they could not take the fabled city
without the help of the wounded archer, the Greeks send an
emissary to tetes
woo him back
to their ranks. Feeling betrayed, Philoc-
spurns their entreaties.
his pain
and
collective
loneliness,
He wishes
amid
and wait for death. The chorus, representing
wisdom, urges him
gagement over
to retreat into his cave,
to reconsider
selfish exile, but
and choose heroic en-
he persists in his refusal. Finally he
experiences a vision of Heracles urging him to return to the fray.
does
so, slays Paris,
and
is
instrumental in the
fall
He
of the citadel.
Sophocles' play has often been interpreted as dramatizing the conflict
between the individual and the demands of
go deeper if we recognize to feel betrayed
^ Absent
Fathers,
by
his
that,
society.
But we
while Philoctetes certainly had reason
comrades, his response was essentially narcis-
Lost Sons,
p.
23.
38 Dragon Dread
A narcissistic
sislic.
damaged
wound
occurs
when
gestahonly. Such a person for instance,
less
is
is
"wound-identified." Philoctetes' war,
own progressive
come
terms with his society and
terms with his liness,
its
demands, he must come
life,
repair
not in retreating from
In myth,
discern what
that courses within us
that
fashions,
it
which he
It
is
timeless in our
is
summons
hum-
to a great
drama
and fashioned, world
Mythic motifs show us how the ancients
his-
intuitively discerned
no accident
that the parents of
depth psychology, Freud and Jung, turned frequently to
to learn
and describe the movement of those invisible energies
shape history through the acts of individuals.
The serpent serpent
was
Mother, for the earth.
cycle of it
even as
dilemmas of humankind.
modem
into
the shock of recognition,
bled by our small part or ennobled by the
myth
come only by engag-
The cave
it.
his own mother complex, the place of comfortwarm and wet with pity and solicitude. religious tradition and cultural patterns we see the
movement of archetypal forces. We human condition. We are stunned by
the
the projection of
is
is in fact
ing darkness,
tory.
to
rage and the enormous desire to retreat into lone-
heroic in himself. His healing will
is
ing fully in
would
own
versus regressive impulses. Before he can
pain and self-pity. His vision of Heracles
which
that
is
with the Trojans or his Greek comrades than
with his to
one's core sense of self
and, as a result, one tends to view the world through that
associated with the mysteries of nature, with the Great its
As
life
The
motif, for example, reveals a rich ambivalence.
whole length was
such, the serpent
and death.
invited regression;
secrets of healing
On
in contact
embodied
with that primal source,
the mysteries of the great
the one hand, as a denizen of the depths,
on the
other,
it
sheds
its
own
skin,
knows
and renewal. At the sanctuary of Asclepius
at
the
Epi-
warm baths, symbolic of womb, and waited upon dreams or the bite of ser-
daurus the pilgrim in search of heahng took regression to the
pents from the lower world. Such visitations helped bring body and soul back into relationship with the Great Mother. Accordingly, the serpent's bite
is
analogous to the dual aspect of the mother, that
archetypal force which gives both gives
life
and seeks
to take
it
back.
Dragon Dread 39
A
man's
life teeters
on
edge between regression and
that fine
progression, between annihilation and individuation. the cessation of the psychic stress
whole impetus of his potential,
which begins
his genetic inheritance
is
He
yearns for
at birth,
while the
toward the realization of
both as an individual and as a part of his culture.
D. H. Lawrence captured the resulting tension well in a tled
poem
ti-
"Snake. "2^ While visiting a well in Sicily, the speaker in the
poem encounters
a serpent sunning
itself.
He
is
fascinated by the en-
counter with the Other, but:
The voice of my education
said to me He must be killed .... And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would
him now, and
take a stick and break
He wrestles with
finish
his admiration of the natural being,
voices implore: "If you were not afraid, you would
and admiration vie ately,
in his soul.
begins to slide back
earth."
The poet
who was
is filled
down
Then
snake
with a sense of horror
his impulsiveness:
self-judgment
to
off.
and yet those
kill
him!" Fear
the serpent, slowly, dehber-
into "the dark
"deliberately going into the blackness."
flings a log at the
him
door of the secret at the idea
At
that
of one
moment he
break the tension. Immediately he regrets
"How paltry, how
vulgar,
what a mean
act!" His
harsh:
is
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords Of life. And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness. Thus
the ambivalence of
men toward
the underworld.
both fascinated and frightened. Back there they sense, but also annihilation.
So they
lie
origins
They
are
and healing,
fling the logs
of fear and
the chance for rapprochement passes.
When plains,
I
was
a child
persuaded
me
my
grandfather,
that his navel
^^ In Norton Anthology of Poetry,
pp.
who once
rode the western
was where an Indian arrow had
952-954.
40 Dragon Dread once pierced him. While puzzled that lieved
him wholeheartedly.
wound,
omphalos spun
the
track of disconnection we
tight
all
had a similar wound,
I
he was
Intuitively,
longed suffering.
It is
Such a wound
carry.
our
is
be-
I
the world's
from the solar plexus, the
dertake this exile from the source which ration, irrevocable
right.
and
trace
obliges one to un-
lives.
obliges sepa-
It
and omnipresent, as well as isolation and pro-
When men
either bury themselves in a
wound
feel the
that
cannot heal, they
woman's arms and ask
which she cannot provide, or they hide themselves
her for healing,
macho
in
pride
and enforced loneliness. In the story of Philoctetes, the chorus ex-
him
plains to his
life,
move
is
the universality of this
wound and
that
he
still
only overcome by the vision of Heracles urging his return to is
the encounter with the hero archetype.
The hero archetype
is
present in us
mobilize the energies which serve
all. It is
life,
the inherent capacity to
overthrown the demons of
to
despair and depression. Incarnating this archetype has
with outer
feats; rather
manifests
it
when one summons
may admire
selves. This is
continually prods us to
the beginnings of all peoples there
event
is
people has
all
do
womb. We
never worship a
make something of
our-
is
a
myth of
the primal act,
else stems. In the life of the individual,
the severing of the maternal connection. Similarly, each
its
my thos of a fall, loss of the
ceding consciousness. Perhaps logical,
to
an heroic task that awaits our response.
or genesis, from which this
we should
heroic accomphshments, but
The psyche
little
the energy to
confront fear, pain and the regressive attraction of the
At
live
but he wraps himself in pain and self-pity. This regressive
the battle. This
hero.
must
this racial
paradisical connection pre-
memory
is
only the neuro-
phylogenetic trace of the trauma of birth separation. But out
of this separation comes the experience of duality.
Thus begins the cess that
is
spiral
of consciousness, an ever-developing pro-
founded on the experience of subject and object, and oc-
casions the pain of ever-further distance from the primal connection.
The growth of conscious
culture, in the life of the tribe or of the
individual, brings the fruits of civilization but, as well, greater
greater estrangement
from the Great Mother.
and
Dragon Dread 41
Every day
we stand poised on
fering the world's
wound.
the razor's edge of consciously suf-
How great the temptation to hide in a cave
some comforting arms. Each morning
or to sink into
gremlins of fear and lethargy return.
we
sallied forth yesterday; they are
It
the grinning
does not matter
back today and, not
nibble our toes, will gobble our souls
if
we
how
satisfied to
them. Thus,
let
boldly
we have
evolved elaborate ways to avoid the pain of further consciousness.
Many remain
infantile in their thoughts,
emotions and actions.
turn to the soporifics of drugs and alcohol. gies, fer
Still
Some
others turn to ideolo-
simple-minded -isms, religions or socio-political views
that of-
black and white answers to complex questions, thereby relieving
one of the struggle with the tension of opposites.
At the same
time, the
life
force surges within each culture and each
individual. This powerful eros seeks
hind.
its
connection ahead, not be-
requires the activation of the hero archetype within a society
It
and within individuals.
It
was
the task of the great religions
and
rites
men through the nexus of lethargy and progresmost men are left to find their own path. Society still
of passage to guide sion, but today,
depends on them prosper
if its
to undertake this challenge, for
men are
immature.
Sometimes, knowing he cannot return project that yearning onto the cosmos.
was much given eternity."
who
One
to this
senses
no society can
The
womb,
culture of
a
man
for instance, the
will
Romanticism
Sehnsucht fur Ewigkeity or "yearning in,
it
to the
for
myth of Empedocles,
flung himself into the crater of Etna, and the paintings of Kas-
par David Friedrich, notably The Wanderer Above the Mists. Thanatos, the
longing for extinction,
is
poised always against eros, the
life
force. Historically, mystics
have sought to describe the indescrib-
able, consistently reporting
two
ence
is
essentially ineffable
But, far
more
often,
characteristics: the mystical experi-
and involves a merging with the
men
All.
seek their reconnection to the cosmic,
As mentioned earlier, the femman on three levels. He encounters it in the
primal source through a relationship. inine
is
experienced by a
presence of an outer
woman
feminine side of the other man.
and
in
gay relationships through the
He meets
it
in his relationship to his
42 Dragon Dread
own anima. And
he encounters
it
in his relationship to the archetypal
world, his relationship to nature, to his instinctual center and to the life
force in general.
man is largely at the mercy of what he does not know about himself. And the extent to which he is in the dark is the degree to which his own inner woman is projected onto another In
any relationship a
person. Since projection
is
by
definition a
dynamic whereby uncon-
scious contents are experienced as outer, a
love with, or fearing, his
own
We recall that normally the
man
is
"Duino Elegy," quoted
poet, Stephen
Dunn,
personal mother
at the
how
recalls
falling in
unconscious material. is
the primary media-
tor of our experience of the feminine. Rilke plays third
always
on
this truth in his
beginning of this chapter. Another
his mother, at his request, revealed
her breast to him. Gently, modestly and lovingly she assuaged his curiosity
and
his fears,
me / to
permits
love
and
that experience, writes
women
Dunn,
"I think
easily. "^^
For other men, the early mediation by the mother was less gentle, less reassuring.
that all of the
whom was
The authors who coined
the term "serial killers" note
dozens of mass murderers they studied (only one of
female) had disturbed childhoods. Always their crimes
were sexually motivated, whether a sexual
act
was attempted or
Their fear and rage were mostly directed against they
felt
women, with whom
incapable of forming bonds of warmth. Richard Speck
typical example.
When he could
not.
is
a
not sustain an erection while raping
the Chicago nurses, he killed them.^'^
Recently an analysand reported that a co-worker had tried to run her over with a car. a
room
at their place
He
also had physically barred her
of employment he considered his
When
they had dated and cuddled.
uncommon. Many men
^ "The
Routine Things ^^ Robert Ressier and
81.
and then
are full of rage against
Around
territory.
Once
she sought to deepen the relation-
ship, his behavior turned increasingly rude
not
from entering
the House," in
women, and
Not Dancing,
Tom Schactman, Whoever
violent. This is
p.
often
40.
Fights Monsters,
pp. 79-
Dragon Dread 43 they act
it
out. Their rage is in
and quite easy
But many times the rage
enough
some
cases the product of child abuse
to identify etiologically in terms of cause
is
of the child
When
violated.
is
not
of course the accumulation
of anger, the epiphenomenal emotion that occurs territory
effect.
much mother and
because of too
is
father as a balance. Their rage
and
when
peatedly breached, either by abuse or by too
much
the psychic
boundary
this fragile
re-
is
interference in the
ego suffers permanent damage and
child's development, the nascent
may become sociopathic. The sociopath cannot form
a caring relationship with others.
A
man's experience of the primal relationship may have been so painful that
he expects
relationships can only be painful.
all
Thus
his life is a
dreary cycle of fearing domination by others and seeking to exploit
them
instead.
Many
woman
a
has set out to change such a
found herself the victim of abuse. As his personality
from
it
off the Other. Sadly, that historic pain
constant buffer between himself and others.
accomplishments, he
ternal
man and
a protection
he cannot bear to turn within and suffer that pain,
his pain,
thereby lifting
is
is
No
becomes
the
matter what his ex-
man. He
a terribly frightened
is
so
frightened that he cannot bear to look at his pain and can only see the
Other as the source or continuance of it. It is
not
blamed
my
later),
intention here to
but
it
is
blame mothers (nor
will fathers
be
necessary to acknowledge that the affectively
charged imago of the feminine
is
considerably influenced by the ex-
perience of the personal mother and by the early experience of the nurturant environment. It is
mode
essentially a
particular kind of
women and by
The anima
is
an archetypal energy
in all
men.
of experiencing and relating, rather than a
knowledge. Influenced by relationships with outer
the culture (which
Madonna
is
in
vogue, for instance,
the Virgin of Chartres or the virgin of erotica), a man's incarnation of the inner feminine
is
force that courses within him, shifting I
moods.
shall
wife,
how he stands in relation to the life and how much he is at the mercy of its
a function of
never forget the
walked
in, sat
man who, dragged
down, noticed a box of
into therapy
tissues
and
said,
by
his
with a
44 Dragon Dread
woman
smirk, "I see you had a correct, but
I
said.
I
countered: if
was
"Men can weep
too,"
"But they don't have too," he
I
and
here last hour." Factually, he
did not want to concede his point.
"Many men carry
they don't
let
out
it
replied, "they
say, "You're a fool, like them."
When had
afraid of, he said only that he felt he
who had
cause she was the one
it
He smirked again,
will kill them."
it
can work
out."
a mountain of rage and a lake of tears,
to
problems.
as
if to
asked him what he was
I
keep
his wife in line be-
As one might
predict, his
"therapy" did not continue.
Generally speaking, a boy can suffer "too muchness" and "too
As
tleness."
Joseph's
of the
illustrations
latter,
I
think of two men.
When
revolved around a single, and signal, event.
life
lit-
He stood in the home and watched her get in a car with a strange man and drive away forever. He never saw her again. His father refused he was eight his mother announced she was leaving.
door of their
to discuss her
and continued
his alcoholic retreats
Joseph grew up feeling abandoned. Never
leam
from
his pain.
he did
facile in school,
when he came to me he was the manager He came to therapy on his own third therapist he had visited. He had taken
support himself and
to
of a small manufacturing business. volition; in fact,
I
was
his wife to a therapist
When
that
whom he
seemed
the
two years
earlier "to get her straightened out."
to fail, they jointly visited a
Joseph believed that
was obsessed with
him and
his wife loved
the idea that she
their
While the
therapist
communicate (and
riage),
is
partly at the
two
was having casual
and indiscriminate, whenever the opportunity
to
second therapist
insisted hypnotize his wife "to get at the truth."
Although
children, he
affairs,
quick
arose.
mercy of what the
certainly affairs are not
client
unknown
chooses
within mar-
Joseph's examples of his wife's adultery cast considerable
doubt on
their probability.
niversaries they rented a
casinos.
For example, on one of their wedding an-
room
in a hotel in
one of the Atlantic City
While he was taking a shower room service
was convinced
that his wife
knew
the waiter
aison during those few minutes. His proof picious." Similar
arrived.
Joseph
and had had a quick
was
that she
li-
"looked sus-
examples were forthcoming, each possible but
re-
Dragon Dread 45 quiring a stretch of the imagination. At his request,
I
interviewed his
wife in private. She confirmed her commitment to the marriage and
wondered why he was always so suspicious
The power of the scious,
invisible, of the ineluctable
clearly seen in Joseph's
is
energy of the uncon-
He had
dilemma.
seen Her, his
mother's, disappearing back, and from that single traumatic event
had concluded
that
he could not count on Her.
The psyche often functions analogously, here before." Rationally, the current situation
saying, "I have been
may have
with what happened in the past, but the linkage
is
who
Joseph's wife became that feminine, intimate Other well-being in her hands.
As she was
nothing to do
there emotionally.
held his
capable of loving him, so in his
mind she was capable of infidehty, of taking off with another man mother had. His mother complex embroidered the
just as his
reaching the anticipated, dreaded conclusion that this
facts,
woman,
too,
would leave him. Joseph's psychic
"She who his wife,
what devil
is
left
—and
life
was organized around
will again."
However
charged imago of
grossly unfair this
was
to
he could not help but replay the fantasy, in accord with
known
psychoanalytically as "reaction formation." Better the
you have known than the ambiguity and tension of the un-
known. Memory replayed the same
—
in spite
its
autonomy over the
donment asserted reality.
that
that
sad, terrifying scenario
—aban-
of the overt presence of his wife. The complex rational
mind and constructed
its
own
So great was Joseph's wound, and the defenses around
he quit therapy
when he could
it,
not receive confirmation of his
wife's betrayal.
Another man, Charles, suffered the
loss of his father
when he was
young. His mother went into a depression lasting years, leaving Charles feeling doubly abandoned. His later relations with adult
women not
^
followed the pattern of iht puer aeternus, the
grown out of his mother need.^^ He would
See, for instance, Marie-Louise
man who
has
women,
put
idealize
von Franz, Puer Aeternus:
A
cal Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, Sharp, The Secret Raven: Conflict and Transformation.
Psychologi-
and Daryl
46 Dragon Dread
them on
and then, once they were committed
a pedestal,
tionship, he
would
pull
away and
to the rela-
Women who
protect himself.
ex-
perienced this understandably withdrew themselves in puzzlement
and sometimes anger. Charles seemed genuinely dumbfounded by their reaction, for
done nothing
to
In fact, his
he
felt
they should have understood and that he had
push them away.
mother was the one he wished had understood
his
childhood need for nourishment and consistency, even in the face of her own grief, and how he as a child was paying twice. Again, the wound was so deep to the child that the adult, as with Joseph, continued to see the fauh "out there," in rather than recognize the
was simply
his goal in therapy
found
to refine his choice of
women. He
ambivalence, rejection and abandonment was set up inside
himself and projected onto every
woman
he met.
Naturally, without a capacity for introspection, live in a
fantasy,
to relationships,
very difficult to acknowledge that the pattern of false ideal-
it
ization,
women in general. Accordingly,
psychodynamic he brought
one
is
doomed
to
world created by projection and, no surprise, find one's
and worst
fears, reflected back.
Ever and always, what
we
have not owned within will be projected without.
One parents
last
example may
who worked
They faced not only
Stephen grew up with immigrant
suffice.
"make it" in America. new culture, but the difficulties of
very hard in their store to the rigors of a
making any business survive during
worked long hours beside
the thirties
and
forties.
Stephen
his parents but never felt nurtured
them. They were always up against the odds,
all
by
of them, and he
was, as children have often been historically, part of the family survival
network without
In his adult life
never
felt satisfied.
and every
woman
his
own
needs being addressed.
Stephen married and remarried and had His
wound was
similarly that of
abandonment,
he became close to was expected to
tragic deficit of his childhood.
Of one
most enjoyed was cuddling with
affairs, but
make up
mistress, he said that
her, lying
the
what he
on her abdomen. When
she wanted sex he was afraid of her demands. The scene he depicts is
actually that of
Madonna and
child, safe
and warm,
far
from the
Dragon Dread 47 tough
and hard times of the
streets
past.
Stephen was forever angry with the trolled
them through money and
women
threats,
and
he con-
in his hfe;
they were using
felt
him. Again, the very deep pattern was that She was not there for him. His narcissistic void was of such magnitude that no
could
fill it,
even the most co-dependent mothering Other he could
Thus Stephen's
find.
woman
life
was
characterized by sadness, for he
was
the chronically undernourished child desperately seeking a partner
who would
offer the
cosmic nurturance of the Great Mother. Mean-
while he became a bully,
full
of rage and demanding compliance.
Again, the same sad cycle plays
make
itself out.
his partner the nurturant Other, that
magnitude of
ways he
own need and
his
testifies to the
Whether
is,
the
tries to
the mother, or fears the
defends himself against her, in
all
power of the mother complex. Jung alluded
In describing the pervasive influence of the anima,
the novel
man
to
She by H. Rider Haggard, wherein the hero encounters
"She who must be obeyed." Television viewers can see a comic take
on
PBS series "Rumpole of the Bailey," where the crusty Leo McKem, after besting the Queen's finest before the
this in the
old actor bar,
shudders
when he
hears the stentorian "Rumpole!" of his wife
and dejectedly mutters, "She
who must be
Again, recall that the anima tern
which mediates man's
force.
The encounter with
is
an archetype, that
summarizes the
is,
relationship to instinct
the personal
conditions a man's relationship to his child's experience
obeyed." a psychic pat-
and
to the life
mother inevitably colors and
own
anima, but too often the
dominates the man's psychology. Loren Pederson
task:
One of a man's
greatest developmental tasks
is
to
achieve a healthy
separation from the bond with his personal mother.
He must
also de-
velop an awareness of the importance of the image of the archetypal
mother .... Unlike the daughter, the son lacks a primary identifica tion with his mother, especially as he begins to psychologically
emerge from her. In adult life, remnants of the original attachment/ separation problem are conveyed by a man's internal anima image.^^ 2^ Dark Hearts: The Unconscious Forces That Shape
Men 's
Lives,
p.
74.
48 Dragon Dread
The man who the the
fantasizes that his wife
cavorting with another,
is
man who acts out his ambivalence toward his intimate partner, man who rages at his inadequately nourishing wife, the man who
telephones his wife from every truck stop or airport, controls the
bankbook and claims
who
his wife
incompetent with finances, the
has an incessant roving eye,
gays, the
man who
have not yet
left
When we remember
women down and attacks own expense all
puts
home. They are attached
of touch with their
rience, out
who
own
still
to the
that patriarchy
contrary to widespread opinion, are
is
a cultural contrivance, an
obliged to
most
is still
is
realize
that
men,
the dependent sex.
most ambushed by
Whenever a man is when he feels he must be a
in denial.
be a good boy, or conversely
bad boy, or a wild man, he
we
more often
the rugged individualist,
his inner feminine, for he is
mother-son expe-
soul.
invention to compensate for powerlessness,
The Marlboro Man,
—
please his partner at his
tries to
man
compensating for the power of the
mother complex. I
do not say
dent; that
how
is
it is
a
man's
fault that
merely human. What
is
he
is
so vulnerable, so depen-
his responsibility is to recognize
deeply any child needs positive mothering and
pattern of that need sets his psychic
operate beneath the surface.
He may
life in
how much
the
motion and continues
to
pretend to adult empowerment,
hold the reins of government or the purse, but the lines of stress reach deep
down
into his relationship with his mother.
grasp and accept this
fact,
and then take responsibihty for
Men must it,
or they
will continue to play out infantile patterns forever.
The following diagram, adapted from Jung's explanation of what is
going on psychologically
countertransference, in
shows
in therapy, in
terms of transference and
the variety of exchanges that take place
any heterosexual relationship.^^
^^ For a
my Middle Passage, pp. 46The Survival Papers: Anatomy of a Midlife Crisis, pp. "cross-cousin 70ff. (For Jung's original description and diagrams of the marriage," see "The Psychology of the Transference," The Practice of Psyfuller
discussion of these dynamics, see
47, and Daryl Sharp,
chotherapy,
CW
16,
pars. 422ff.)
Dragon Dread 49
animus
anima
Although the relationship may play level,
each person
scious, suggested
love happens
is
by the
when
out on the conscious
itself
informed by the contents of his or her uncon-
The experience of
vertical axes.
the Other lines up,
if
with one's inner image of the beloved. The Other seldom
measure up
so one regularly
to this expectation,
man's relationship tionship to his
own
to the
falling in
only for the time being,
falls
if
ever can
out of love. The
beloved can never be better than his
anima, because what
is
unconscious
him
in
rela-
will
be contaminating his relationship with the Other, just as the Other
him
projecting onto
While the anima has archetypal that experience is essentially
other females in the boy's
roots, recall that the
life
and by the images available at his
styles himself as the perfect
favor, be
Her good
that
men
search for Her in other
is
so dependent.
husband because of
tousness toward his wife, yet inside he
To the extent
in his sur-
wife for not mothering
him, though consciously he does not think he
win Her
mediation of
by way of the personal mother, then by
rounding culture. Thus Stephen rages
George
still is
They overlook
soul's flight, in the
women,
in art
And
his solici-
seeking to serve Her,
child.
are
unaware
women,
that the
flee Her,
anima
is
within, they
oppress Her, ask Her to be
work or
Beatrice in their underworld, anesthetize Her pain through drugs.
is
in turn.
the presence of
company of
and music and
Her
in their
dreams,
in their
other men, in camaraderie with
sport,
and
in their fantasies
and
tran-
50 Dragon Dread madness. The
sient
man who
fundamental, that
ship
is
self,
about
life
it
influences everything he feels about him-
and about others,
of course, that of which he
Even
denies that the mother-child relation-
profound ignorance. And,
lives in
ignorant will be projected onto others.
is
his deepest sexuality is fueled
by
with Her, connected again, however transiently, he
Most men consider
No
tering.
even no
raise will
enough with a
to
the conditions of their
assuage the daily loss of soul.
he
that
is
it,
mercy of the world and
reassure triste,
a daily bat-
washroom, and
A man
understands,
fragile, tactile
he
bring
it,
is
is
large
connection
it
home,
only for
if
disconnected again,
adrift, at
battering.
its
the eyelids each morning, as he rose
sleep to face another day, one in
is
or the anima of another man, he places his soul's
awhile." Then, post coitum
Under
he
home. life
and no paycheck
selling his soul,
compensate. Thus, upon the
woman,
burden. "Take care of
the
is
working
perks, no car, no key to the executive
deep down,
When
this projection.
man
from the depths of
was back
reported feeling that he
high school playing football. The line was poised, and in that
moment, before of economic
the snap of the ball, before the
life,
shock and
collision
he fantasized always of sex. Another man, whose
mother had been absent-spirited and
rejecting,
charged his anima
He insisted his wife make love every day until, finally, she rebelled. He felt all the hurt and rejection again, and a vague sense of impending death. "Each time we make love," he said, "I feel I buy a day back from death. Each day we with addictive longing for Her.
don't,
I
feel death
has crept a
little
closer."
For both these men, sex served as reassurance and reconnection, rather than as an experience of
communication and intimacy.
symbolically, their religion. For the former
man
was,
the battering contin-
ued; the constant fantasy of sex with anyone along the a pallid palhative to the soul's scars. For the
It
way
served as
latter, his ability to
see
that
he was actually making his wife into a surrogate mother helped
him
pull
more
back the projection. His sexuality grew
relaxed, less performance oriented,
less
compulsive,
and the tenderness of
their
relationship returned. His realized that his unconscious angst had
Dragon Dread 51
When
such urgency that he had driven his wife away. his inner child's distress
tionship regained
man
Unless a the
its
and
his
compulsive urge
to
he could
own
merge, the
rela-
normal proportions.
can acknowledge his dependency, which
dependency of the child within, he
is
to say
will either flounder in
an un-
healthy relationship with a mother-surrogate or be angry that his
Most men would be
partner does not measure up to his demands.
ashamed but
to
admit that they seek
their
mother through
their partner,
they cannot separate their childhood relationship with the
if
mother from
be replaying an
their current relationship, they will
old,
regressive script.
Jung has written quite eloquently of
drama
that courses
adult being, he
this large,
indeed mythic,
through a man's soul. To become a conscious,
must struggle mightily with
his
mother complex,
rec-
ognizing the battle as an internal one. Otherwise he will certainly project
it
outward onto women, either succumbing
or seeking to dominate them
mother complex. In
—
deepest longing
to their direction
to the
power of
the
and
his
either case he realizes his deepest fear
annihilation in the mother.
The dread and yearning ful,
—both testimonies
for annihilation, writes Jung,
a power-
is
personified "spirit of regression":
[It]
threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and
extinction in the unconscious. For the hero, fear task,
because only boldness can deliver from
not taken, the meaning of future
is
condemned
life is
somehow
is
fear.
a challenge and a
And
violated,
if
the risk
is
and the whole
to a hopeless staleness, to a drab grey
lit
only
by will-o'-the-wisps.^i
One cannot overemphasize the power of this dreadful longing for the womb; sustaining the consciousness to counter it is immensely painful.
Adulthood, existential responsibility for one's survival and
growth,
is
a
Promethean prize wrested from the depths.
separate themselves from mother, from
women, from
their
ima, and think they are safe. Think again. Jung continues:
^^ Symbols of Transformation,
CW
5, par.
551.
Men may own
an-
52 Dragon Dread
Always he imagines his worst enemy in front of him, yet he carries the enemy within himself a deadly longing for the abyss, a longing to drown in his own source, to be sucked down to the realm of the [i.e., the archetypal depths]. If he is to live, he must Mothers.
—
.
.
fight
.
and sacrifice
heights.
.
.
.
Life
childhood and his childish
young person should sacrifice his dependence on the physical parents, lest he that the
remain caught body and soul
in the
bonds of unconscious incest.^^
Thus we see why our ancestors had such powerful sage.
They knew
own
his longing for the past in order to rise to his
demands
all
power of
too well the regressive
rites
of pas-
the psyche, the
longing for the safety and satiety of the Mother. The unconscious
in-
cest of Oedipus, the longing for peace of Philoctetes, the fascination
of Faust for the realm of the Mothers
would blame on women, but life's
—
all
such seductions
their true origin lies in
men's
men
fear of
pain and the lure of annihilation.
There
is
way
a
out of the labyrinth.
Some men do
escape the un-
conscious bonds to the Mother. They are liberated, not from Her, but
from
their
But only
submission to their
their daily
own
longing for rest and sanctuary.
courage and vigilance, their work on themselves,
keeps them from slipping back.
Two examples
of
men
involved in such work
may
help.
One man,
Lawrence, was raised by a narcissistically needy mother. His father served her, his sister served her, and Lawrence served her. left
home he
also served,
married a little
woman
with a congenital illness
suspecting that in choosing this
When
he
whom
he
person he was
maintaining his bondage to his mother. At midlife he developed a first-class depression.
He
left his
wife, and, riddled with guilt, en-
tered therapy. After nearly a year of writhing in the coils of remorse
and indecisiveness over having relinquished
his rescuing role,
he had
the following dream.
A woman is standing on a balcony looking at me. There
is
a yellow
sports car there. I
jump
a boat.
^2
Ibid.,
I
in the car
and drive away. Then
I
come
to a lake
and board
see a Greek temple under the water. There are trout there to
par.
553.
Dragon Dread 53
Then
eat as well.
with a bird in
its
I
arrive at the other shore.
mouth.
of the snake and save the bird.
snake becomes a fish and
brooded over him
sudden decision
all
his
is
a snake there
have been
Then
bitten.
the severed
it.
dream images Lawrence thought
life.
to leave her
was
that the
whose presence had The yellow sports car embodied the
the balcony
drive of self-determination.
symbol
I
can eat
I
In his associations to the
woman standing on
There
grab a knife and quickly cut off the head
I
his mother,
domination, to feel the
When he crosses
full
force and
the water, a ubiquitous
for the unconscious, he senses the great riches to be
there: ancient
wisdom embodied on the other
in the fish. Yet,
the archetypal
in the temple,
side,
mother awaits. The
having
found
and food for the soul personal mother,
left the
of
bird, suggestive
spirit
and
tran-
from our old friend the serpent.
scendent purpose,
is still in peril
Again the
masculine decisiveness, the phallic empowerment
will, the
symbolized by the knife, permits him to divide his the regressive serpent-complex.^^
stayed lodged in the mother
The
regressive serpent
Another man,
imago of
his
is
The energy
spirit's flight
that
then available for the journey of
becomes
from
might well have life.
a potentially nourishing fish.
in his late fifties, carried
mother as intervening and
an oppressive introjected
critical.
For decades he had
projected her enervating presence onto his employer, his intimates
and the world her,
in general.
As
a child his only defense
through fantasy and education.
away from her courtesy of
When
was
to
avoid
he was seventeen he flew
the United States Air Force.
He avoided
confrontation with others and lived an essentially isolated life-style.
After I
some time
take a
in therapy
little giri
for a voyage.
changes.
I
am
down
But
I
he dreamt:
to the
dock
to get
on the Queen Elizabeth 2 Then the scene
can't find the ship this time.
led into this wonderful house
by a
beautiful, helpful
woman. This is the house of my dreams. White adobe with a spacious living room with a wonderful glass vista. On a glass coffee table there
is
a beautiful crystal vase with greens.
^^ For a book-length discussion of this theme see Robert L. Gardner, The to Consciousness.
Rainbow Serpent: Bridge
54 Dragon Dread This
man had had many dreams
of ocean voyages or
of his desire to
tures, all representative
air
depar-
avoid his mother's
flee, to
presence. Here he takes an immature anima figure to the mother ship (the complex).
Then
But he can't find
a helpful, adult
no
there's
it;
anima guides him
possibility of flight.
to a beautiful house, reminis-
cent of Beatrice guiding Dante out of the underworld. the Frank
potential being, his soul's Taliesin.
as a
Holy
He
associated
Lloyd Wright-inspired adobe house with the place of
He saw
his
the beautiful crystal vase
of soul-enhancing psychic contents. The
Grail, a container
vase held rich greens, pointing to the life-giving side of the Great
Mother. It is
to
tempting
to
make
betoken a psychic
nated by others.
The
too
much
of such a dream, but
shift.
Since childhood, this
figure
whose
had instead intruded into
did
it
man had
felt
seem domi-
protection he had lacked as a child
wound-
his fragile psychic life, grievously
ing his eros, resulting in a destructive, devouring mother complex.
His gradual understanding of the power of the mother, reflected in
many
life
experiences, allowed
Her onto other people and ing sense of his
to
withdraw the projection of
situations. In so doing,
make choices and had endowed him.
power
with which nature
him
to
No man can be himself until
he has confronted the mother experi-
ence he internalized and carries into
through the courage to confront independent and free of anger.
he has not yet grown up; he
he gained a grow-
to live out the energies
all
subsequent encounters. Only
this potential
If
he
still
abyss can he become
blames mother or women,
seeks the protection, or avoids the
still
domination, of mother.
While
my desire herein is
not to blame but to describe in order to
understand, the parents necessarily play a very large role in the bur-
den the child
What
will carry.
Jung lays
it
out directly:
usually has the strongest psychic effect
which the parents (and ancestors age-old psychological
too, for
phenomenon of
on the
the
life
we are dealing here with
the
original sin)
child
is
have not
lived.
This statement would be rather too perfunctory and superficial did not add
by way of
qualification: that part of their lives
if
we
which
Dragon Dread 55 might have been lived had not certain somewhat threadbare excuses prevented the parents from doing so. To put of
life
which they have always shirked
.
.
.
it
bluntly,
[that]
it is
that part
sows the most
vir-
ulent germs. ^^
Our ancestors
intuited this fact:
conscious and integrated,
Jung notes Atreus
is
after the
what
not suffered, rendered
is
As
rolled over into the next generation.
is
above remarks, "The curse of the House of
no empty phrase."^^ Moreover, he adds, "Nature has no
"^^ use for the plea that one 'did not know.'
Thus, especially, the vagaries of the mother's personality, her level of consciousness, the character of her
own wounding and
at-
tendant strategies, form the psychic inheritance of the child. She
and with
whom
he must
come
about
life
son
married and living with another
is
mining
A
role (to
which
cosmos,
all
the
she
Even when her
may
mother-in-law jokes
Where had been connected
needs met,
gravity and a
now
the child
is
growing consciousness of
human who becomes
ile
many
to terms.
woman
play a deter-
attest).
datum of human experience derives from
crucial
birth separation.^'^
The
is
from which he draws so many messages about himself and
that
a
the original
to the heartbeat
of the
thrust alone into a worid of radical relocation.
The
frag-
mother bears a heavy archetypal weight.
child's experience of the personal
experience of the feminine, that
is,
mother creates the internalized
the
mother complex. The phe-
nomenological experience of the personal mother also conditions and colors the experience of life ral forces, that is,
itself,
is
child
on
its
mother, or mother sur-
is
unavoidable and ripples throughout the
^^ "Introduction to Wickes's 'Analyse der BCinderseele,'
of Personality,
CW
3^
Ibid.,
par.
88.
^
Ibid.,
par.
91.
^^ The phylogenetic lost
the natu-
obvious. The vulnerability of the child occasions a primal
separation anxiety that
all
all
the archetypal mother.
The absolute dependence of the rogate,
of the encounter with
"
life
The Development
17, par. 87.
memory of
peoples have their paradisical state.
tribal
this separation
account of a
may account
"fall,"
the
for the fact that
collective
memory
of a
56 Dragon Dread of the individual. Freud was right in asserting the primacy of eros,
merge or reconnect,
the urge to
disconnection. All his
for the initial experience of life
then, a
life,
man
is
of
seeks reconnection. Since he
cannot go backward to Her, he must seek Her, or her symbolic substitute,
out there in relationship with individuals or institutions, in
ideologies or in the sky-parent, God. In addition to the
trauma of
birth,
mother and child plays an immense
the specific relationship of
role in a
man's personal psychol-
He is most likely to suffer one or both of two He will experience too much of her or not enough.
ogy.
kinds of wounds. In the
the mother's needs, her unaddressed psychology, her
unlived
life,
will inevitably
be imposed on the
child.
former case
wounds, her
Her "too-much-
ness" will flood his fragile boundaries and create in him a sense of powerlessness. This overwhelment will be carried into adult projected onto
women
and events
in general,
and
life,
his powerlessness
will haunt him.
Similariy, a
meet
his
man may
experience the inability of his mother to
needs and suffer a sense of abandonment. Inevitably,
were better
this
would
diminishes one's inner sense of worth ("If
I
ceive what
in a general insecurity as
I
need and deserve"), resulting
well as an addictive, angst-fueled search for Her. self is greatly affected
by these wounds
I
A man's
re-
sense of
—overwhelment or aban-
donment or both.
As
the child experiences the conditionality of his world, mediated
by the mother encounter, so he suffers separation anxiety. This generalized anxiety, existential in scope lates into a
number of unspecific
and
local in experience,
modu-
fears about himself, about others
and about the feminine. These sundry fears are carried
in the
bones
and repeatedly projected onto others. The Indo-Germanic root angh ("to constrict") gives rise to the English
and anger. Perceived untarily
and repeatedly occasion
instinctually, intuitively, at betrayal
In
and sorrow
an essay
titled
words
angst, anxiety, angina
threats to the well-being of the this
knows what
at the loss
organism invol-
range of emotions. The child is
needed and
feels
both anger
of the necessary nurturant Other.
"Mourning and Melancholy," Freud noted
that
Dragon Dread 57 the overt loss of the Other, in death for example, produces grief.
When
the Other
but the object
not there for us emotionally, the loss
is
is still
suffered
is
present. This cognitive dissonance produces
sadness, or melancholy, driven inward but suffered throughout
one's the
most exquisite expressions of longing
The mood of the
poetry.
spiritual,
gave
mantic
rise to the
in
music, in
"Sometimes
I
art
and
minnesingers in the Middle Ages, the
Movement and
in lyric
Feel Like a Mother-
by everyone. Such a "longing
less Child," is intuitively felt
nity"
some of
This silent suffering, this pathos, has produced
life.
for eterlater
Ro-
cowboy
the great preponderance of mournful
songs. Out there, somewhere, She waits.
For most This anger
men is
four possible less,
the dual
essentially
ways
in
wounding
creates anger as well as grief.
unconscious, undifferentiated. There are
which
it
might be processed. Feeling power-
one may become depressed. Depression has been variously de-
fined as "anger turned inward" and "learned helplessness."
may
internalize that anger in the body,
Or one
which may then combine with
other physical circumstances to lead to illnesses such as gastric disorders, migraines, heart disease or cancer. Often the anger will leak
What the man
boy could not express with
out from the repression.
the
mother
as general irritability. This
will surface in
is
the
called
"referred" or "displaced" anger and waits only for the slightest
provocation to erupt in an objectively unwarranted rush of emotion (the
prime indication of an activated complex).
Alternatively, a
man may
act out his anger in self-destructive be-
havior or violence toward others. Rape
is
widely
known
to
be a
crime not of lust but of violence, of referred anger. Violence toward
women,
in particular, is a function
of the intensity of injury to a
man's mother complex. Since the character and depth of the complex is
essentially unconscious, a
in
some Even
man
can only attack what comes to him
outer guise. as an adult, every meeting with the outer feminine will be
charged with his fear of
this
deep inner drama. Naturally, a man
wounding and
will transfer
loss to his outer environment,
even as
his
psyche carries those experiences within, as complexes. Intuiting the
58 Dragon Dread
awesome power of such
and experiencing
internalized history,
potential reenactment in the present, the old fear resurfaces.
power of
driven by his childhood experience of the
between the sexes
Hence
a sad litany of
is
is
the feminine. In
self-defense he will try to dominate or placate the outer Other. the history of relationship
its
He
men
seeking to dominate and control because of their fear of the feminine within themselves. control
As
Whenever and wherever we see men seeking
women, we
a therapist
I
have witnessed
this fear
operating in the one-sided
power balance of many marriages. Seeing trolling
son,
fair play,
ground of resistance.
to give in, to relinquish his
man adamantly
the
family finances and decision making,
common sense and
tional
to
are seeing fear's ugly work.
have appealed
I
only to run up against
In his heart of hearts he
power, but he
is
con-
to rea-
some
might
irra-
truly like
dominated by fear of the
consequences. Fear's ugly work created the patriarchy and, as Blake noted, "blights with plague the marriage hearse."^^
On
the other hand, and just as often, a
seek ways to please and placate.
own
sacrificing his
He
man
tries to
controlled by fear
well-being in the process.
double urge to get his
own way and still
may
keep Her happy, often
Or he indulges
the
avoid confrontation through
passive-aggressive behaviors that seek control and revenge.
One man became mother and
came
a very successful dentist, largely to please his
to replace his
weak
father in her affections.
a profligate spendthrift and finally
ruptcy.
Even he was dumbfounded by
But he be-
drove himself into bank-
the apparent contradiction
between earning nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year and being penniless. "I
It
became a
came
as a great revelation one day
dentist for her, but
the oppressive
power of
I
screwed
^
up
for
blurted out,
me." Feeling
he sought his
He succeeded
only in his
ruination.
For another man, his
all
his mother's ambitions,
revenge in a passive-aggressive revolt.
own
it
when he
mother
fell
"London,"
in
when
on him.
his father died the full brunt of caring for
When
she
made
unreasonable, unceasing de-
Norton Anthology of Poetry.
Dragon Dread 59
mands on him, demands
that repeatedly
and violated
sulted his wife
invaded his marriage,
his privacy, the
man
his wife, charging her with insensitivity to his
—and
greatest need
stifled his
own
rage.
mother
He came
and children complained about
his wife
his
in-
turned his anger on in
her hour of
because
to therapy
sudden outbursts of
anger. These discharges of emotion were seemingly in excess of the
and were, of course, tapping
situations
rage he had carried his whole
life.
into the reservoir of fear
and
To direct his anger toward
his
mother, whose narcissistic needs respected no boundaries, seemed to
him
futile.
him
led
wife,
The
collision of fear
to rationalize her
whom
he
left
it is
fair to
conscious of the effects of his mother com-
and anger
own expense,
or projected at the expense of
becomes conscious of
the lattice- work of history he
be internalized
carries within,
man had
home.
man becomes
others. Until he
say that
for his anguish onto his wife. Psychologically,
plex, he will suffer troubled relationships. His anguish will
mother
behavior and express anger toward his
throughout their marriage, and
blame
redirected the
Until a
his
with the power of his mother complex the
in not dealing
he had never
toward
felt
coerced him to deal with the issue. His wife had
felt
rightly felt a rival
and rage he
at his
he has not grown up. All the neediness of the inner
child remains active in the present, as well as his fear of the mother's
power
to
overwhelm or abandon him. This
is
why
so
many men
seek to control their partner, for they feel the Other, as before,
powerful
still.
And
fied either, so they
is all-
yet their deep, infantile need has not been satis-
seek to
make
their partner into
mother.
Most women do not consciously wish to be their mate's mother but wind up playing out the scenario anyway. It is not hard to see
why
adult intimate relationships are often troubled, given the primacy
of the mother encounter. All our unassimilated need, fear and rage are acted out in intimate relationships.
the
more contaminated they
tionship that the
The
closer these relationships,
are with the detritus of the primal rela-
boy cum man
carries.
Given individual psychological
histories,
and the consequent
intertwining complexities of projection between people,
it
is
a
60 Dragon Dread
wonder
that
any relationship can work
woman becomes mother to
the
man,
the psychological liberation of the
it
at all.
Sometimes, when a
may "work,"
but at the cost of
man from his mother complex
(not
by the woman). Sexual intimacy
is
especially freighted with this archaic burden, because having sex
is
mention the
to
for
many men
fetters retained
the primal reconnection, the closest they ever feel to
the positive mother.
The ghost of
the
mother may
whore complex, where
the
man
assert itself in the so-called virgin-
can only be enthusiastically sexual
with the "dark" side of the feminine, while he assigns his wife the role of
an unapproachable Madonna.
traffic is
the is
Some men
suddenly too intense. Their eros
is
sucked
mother complex; they become asexual with
projected outward in fantasies about other
affairs.
are active sexually
become pregnant, or mothers, and then
until their partners
The romantic Other,
whom
for
their inner
down and
into
their wives, their eros
women
or acted out in
one once yearned,
now
is
"domesticated," contaminated with unconscious mother material. The sexual infantiUty evidenced in men's magazines and beauty pageants is
a
symptom of the need
concrete play; he
to place eros
on a
pedestal, for the
world of
women demands too much. The playboy is literally a boy at can never be a man until he has wrested his eros from the
powerful mother-world within.
Most complex
tragically, feel the
men whose
same need,
eros
is still
bound up
feminine, the anima. To be separated from one's ble wound. One
woman
dialysis machine."
The
said of her husband, "I
child of a cold
had distanced himself from
anima
to
in the
mother
fear and rage toward their own, inner
that
go? Well, no surprise,
and
own
am
soul
is
a terri-
his emotional
critical family, the
man
world of pain. But where was his
it
was displaced onto
his wife.
When
he feh angry, and that was unacceptable to him, he provoked her to anger and then stood back, judgmentally,
When at
he drove her from their bedroom he
at
what he had wrought.
felt
righteous indignation
her abandonment. His emotions, which were in fact precious to
him, were just too painfully charged for him to process himself. His wife's metaphor of emotional dialysis
was not
inexact.
Dragon Dread 61
An even worse case was to
man who, when his wife would say "Charles, we have to talk," would re-
the
him, perhaps once a year,
ply, "If you're like
going
to start that again,
I'm leaving." This sounds
something out of a New Yorker cartoon, but
man
pression of the
quantum of
the prospect of
opening up a dialogue with
The the
it
it
carried
was
it
does
to a
is
thus,
is
not
often horren-
man's relationship with himself. What
unconscious does not go away, ever;
it
is
in
his wife.
does to outer relationships, though that
dous, but what
a factual ex-
and experienced
unexamined mother complex,
greatest cost of the
damage
fear this
active in the soul.
is
Such
self-estrangement erodes the quality of life and poisons relationships.
For a
man
nalized
to heal
he must
first
take account of the unresolved, inter-
mother-child experience, examine
wounds, both personal and
cultural,
the
character
of
his
and, finally, understand the
place of the father in this emotional constellation.
3
The Necessary Wounding: Rites of Passage
While passing through the Shenandoah Valley I
my
wife and
we saw
batteries
recently,
heard the sound of gunfire. Then, surrealistically,
of cannon firing and lines of blue and gray arrayed opposite each
We
other.
New
had happened on an anniversary recreation of the Battle of
Market, where the young cadets of the Virginia Mihtary
tute in
nearby Lexington had rushed into battle in
classroom strategies becoming
As we watched
all
was no surgeon's
happens in real battle, no family ever,
no
felt
I
someone
tent at the rear,
Wilfrid
noble purpose,
Owen,
—
the
no
strangely ambivalent,
else's suffering. pile of
who would have
identified (having fallen, hopefully, facing the its
of 1864
I
knew
severed limbs, as its
heart torn for-
of paper pinned to the back so that one could be
strips
war had
May
and, for many, final.
real,
the exchange of gunfire
rather like an obscene tourist at
there
too
Insti-
I
enemy). Though
shortly before he led his platoon to die a
the armistice in 1918, in
My friend,
that
could not help but recall the lines of
week
before
which he counsels:
you would not
tell
with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old
Lie:
Dulce
et
decorum est
Pro patria mori.^^
And
the bitter lines
by Siegfried Sassoon:
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by. Sneak home and pray you'll never know The
hell
^^ "Dulce et
1989,
^
p.
where youth and laughter go.'*^
Decorum
Est,"
in
Simon
Fuller,
20.
"Suicide in the Irenches,"
ibid.,
p.
21.
62
ed.,
The Poetry of War,
1914-
The Necessary Wounding I
M-16 and Drang
He saw one
names
He just
just for the hell of
He saw
it.
took him nearly a year to
It
like Pleiku
and the
la
of his buddies cut a peasant in half with
on a necklace. Then, twenty-four hours Angeles.
as a nineteen year old
highlands of Vietnam. Carrying an
in the central
a radio, he visited places with
Valley.
machine gun
his
who
also thought of Gerald, an analysand
had found himself
63
VC ears
friends with
after Pleiku,
he was
visit his folks in
could not go back to the old places and people.
Los
in
north Jersey.
And
I
thought
of Hemingway's remark that after the Great War, such terms as
honor and duty had become obscenities and the only sacred words
were the names of towns, I
had
to
hills
and
rivers
wonder why any of us were
ket, Virginia. Certainly
I
where men had
I
hegemony were more important than
slavery,
I
many men who took
more
Mar-
who
died
imagine issues of commerce and
regional
suspect
New
did not object to honoring those
almost 130 years ago. Although
they were even
died.
there, that day, at
afraid not to.
the noble desire to
because
to that field did so
They were
end
there because they
sought the so-called red badge of courage and were more afraid of
Homer asked why he
cowardice and disgrace than showering canisters of shrapnel.
knew
this. In
the Iliad,
when
the Trojan hero Hector
fought with such valor, he replies that he
shamed by Thus
is
his
is
more
is
afraid of being
comrades than of being pierced by Greek
fear the piper that plays the tune to
lances.
which men dance, and
march off to war, unconsciously.
When,
as a child during the
pointment on some foreign
soil,
war I
years,
read
all I
I
discerned a future ap-
could about war so that
might ready myself. As a graduate student during Vietnam a deferment and a high lottery number; felt
I
had
failed
some
great
test,
though
about the war, nor any desire to
who
went, and also those
who
I
visit
received
had no conscious
Da Nang.
I
Modern
I
also felt
Verse in English,
I
illusions
respected those I
respected con-
words of Karl Shapiro: "Yours
we came home to.'"^^ But
^^ "Conscientious Objector," in
I
relieved but ashamed.
stayed and protested.
scientious objectors, recalling the the conscience
was
I
I
is
shame and won-
p.
574.
The Necessary Wounding
64
dered
how I might have measured
afraid, but
the test
wondered
I
and not
my
let
if,
up.
I
knew
of
in the face
was no shame
it
terror,
could have passed
I
buddies down. Though
I
be
to
my
have had
share
of Tet Offensives since, in confronting the inner demons through the analytic descent into the underworld,
My
point here
Rather
is
it
wonder.
not to debate matters of war or foreign policy.
is
make
to
still
I
clear the
Satumian burden once again. While
itself, make enormous demands wounded by such a summons. Having
every civilization must, to preserve
on
its
citizens,
examined
each
wounding
is
previous chapter the enormous influence of the
in the
mother complex
man
in a
man's
life,
we must now examine how male
both necessary and, sometimes, appalling.
is
During the question and response session to a
Jung Society, a man stood up and
middle-aged now. wife told
A
after a talk
said, as best
few years ago, when
I
was
me she didn't love me any more and was
devastated.
I
wanted
to die.
Now
I
I
had given
I
recall: "I
thirty-eight,
leaving me.
realize she did
me
me to deal with my anger, my me to deal with myself."
While he did not use the word anima^ wife had forced him to deal with his inner
it
was
life
was
a favor.
drove her away. She forced
abandonment. She forced
I
am my
clear that the
I
fear of
man's
because she would no
longer accept his projections onto her. His wounding was painfully obvious, but his courage, his willingness to the
more impressive. His comments bespoke
aphorism: "What does not destroy us So,
then,
wounds
the
that
One of my
prompt us first
himself,
may make
to
grow
was
us stronger."^^
double-edged sword of wounding.
that crush the soul, distort
and those
work on
the truth of Nietzsche's
There are
and misdirect the energy of
life,
up.
analysands in Zurich was a middle-aged
man who
had never had a relationship with a woman. He experienced sexual arousal only
when he
fantasized a
could kiss a woman's foot.
woman beating a child
He had
or
when he
never met his father and his
mother had been the leader of a religious commune. Her assaults on
42 "Xwilight of the Gods,"
in
The Portable Nietzsche,
p.
467.
The Necessary Wounding his eros
had
wounds, destroying
inflicted terrible
65
on
his fragile hold
masculinity.
On
the other hand, there are "necessary"
quicken consciousness, obliging us to
new
tion into
move
wound
there often lies a person's genius. "^^
ambivalent nature of wounding obliges that crush
that
As Jung The
catalysts to the next stage of growth.
life,
noted, behind one's
tween those
wounds, those
out of the old dispensa-
and those
us, then, to differentiate be-
that enliven.
Again,
we
are trying to
understand with some objectivity what our ancestors often grasped intuitively.
Wounding has always been
a crucial dimension of
initiation to adulthood, to sacred societies
male
and even sometimes
to
profession.
Thus another male
secret:
because men must leave Mother, and
transcend the mother complex, wounding I
have before
George
painter
the Mississippi
often the
first
their leaders,
One
me
the
A
is
necessary.
the nineteenth-century
Catlin. Trained as a lawyer, the
young
American
Catlin crossed
and visited some thirty-eight separate Indian nations,
white they had seen.
He
left
behind
scenes of the hunt and everyday
looks with horror
rites.
work of
at his
skewer was driven
paintings of the
many
paintings of
and
their rituals.
life,
Mandan Sioux
initiatory
into the pectoral muscles of the
initiate
and he was raised by rope from those hooks toward the ceiling of the ceremonial lodge. his breast, until
He was swung
when he recovered he placed be severed as a further
The sive
around, hanging from the hooks in
he fainted. Then he was lowered to the ground and a finger
on a buffalo
skull, the digit to
sacrifice."^"^
history of civilization
is full
of less dramatic but no less deci-
examples of initiation. What are the messages conveyed by such
apparent cruelty? First, as
The boy
Joseph Campbell notes: is
being carried across the difficult threshold, from the
sphere of dependency on the mothers to that of participation in the
"^^ "^^
"The Gifted Child," The Development of Personality, CW 17, par. 244. Harold McCracken, George Catlin and the Old Frontier, pp.l06ff.
66
The Necessary Wounding
means of a decisive physical transmeans of a series of intense psychological experiences, reawakening but at the same time nature of the fathers, not only by
formation of his
own body
reorganizing
the primary imprints and fantasies of the infantile
all
... but also by
unconscious.^^
Whether
be circumcision, sub-incision,
the act of ritual mutilation
knocking out a tooth or clipping off an ear or ficed
is
what
material (m^rer-mother) security and dependency.
wrench the boy from liance
finger,
his oedipal
on the known, the
is sacri-
The
elders
dependence and cut off the easy
re-
protective, the secure, all aspects of the
mother world.
However
painful such ordeals, they
for the younger.
They moved from
were
acts of love
by the elder
gratuitous acts of violence
on
were
at-
helpless victims to the realm of the religious, since they
tended by the
rites
of male community, song, dance and the use of
the "bull-roarer" to induce a trance-like state,
Those swinging by
ordinary.
their pectorals
the Sioux lodges were, through ecstatic experience.
tence in the here tory, the history
Such
rites
That
is,
and now
one transcending the
from the ridge poles of
ceremony and
pain,
vouchsafed an
they were translated from childhood exis-
into the transcendent realm of sacred his-
of their gods, their people and male mysteries.
were
far
more elaborate
for
boys than for
girls.
As
Mircea Eliade explains, For boys, initiation represents an introduction to a world that
immediate
—
the world of spirit and culture. For girls,
not
of revelations concerning the secret
trary, initiation involves a series
meaning of a phenomenon
is
on the con-
that
is
apparently natural
—
the visible
sign of their sexual maturity."^^
Thus
for girls, initiation into adult society
their
mother's world, biologically and phenomenologically experi-
meant simply
replicating
enced with the onset of menstruation. But for boys, the advent of puberty signaled the
move from dependent childhood
^^ The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology,
^ Rites
and Symbols of
Initiation,
p.
47.
p.
99.
to the
demand-
The Necessary Wounding
67
ing adult role of keeper and preserver of the symbolic values of the
These values included honoring the directives of the gods,
tribe.
membership
in the collective,
The move from from body and
and keeping watch on the ramparts.
the creature comforts of the hearth to the frontier,
instinct to
symbolic service, from childhood
to adult-
hood, requires the crossing of a huge psychological divide. The
wounding
bestowed with
then, are inflicted ritually,
rites,
help both the youth and the society he must sustain.
with
ters pain,
message
the
immediacy, he learns
all its
that
he can't go
sion, crosses that divide is
men
for
no
rites,
today
home
again.
is
So most of us
macho compensation,
monly, to suffering our shame and indecision
Given the of passage
similarity of structure,
among disparate and
would have thought
it
their
in the rites
geographically separate cultures, one
it
is,
would seem
that
such cere-
welled up from archetypal
Most mythic motifs and transcendent
visions originate in the
of the individual or of the small group. These images
arise to support
and
direct the flow of libido, to channel
ergy in meaningful ways. So, then,
own
most com-
ceremonies ordained by some central
monies originated spontaneously, that
life
or,
swag-
in isolation.
sequence and motive
conmiittee. Barring that impossibility,
our
difficult
are left to our private dependencies, to
gering about in embarrassing
psychic
How
help across that great abyss. There are
very few wise elders, and minimal modeling of mature male
initiates.
roots.
of his flesh
granted an ecstatic vi-
and enters the adult world.
who have no
As he encoun-
in the rigors
He
eros, to
we might
human
en-
expect that the work of
depths, our unconscious processes, might also incarnate
passages, for in each man's psyche course the
same energies
that
animated our ancestors.
manhood may be seen in the dream of twentyNorman. Norman recalled only one good time in his
Such a summons eight-year-old life.
lege,
to
That was when, having abused drugs and dropped out of colhe
moved
a bakery.
in
with an uncle and worked side by side with him
But the gravitational
lack of confidence to bring
in
pull of his family colluded with his
him back
to live
with his parents. For
several years he drifted in and out of psychiatric treatment, though he
The Necessary Wounding
68
had no significant pathological developmental, that
is,
problems were rather
features. His
problems of maturation and separation. His
mother was psychologically invasive,
his father absent
on business
most of the time and extremely passive even when present.
When Norman came to me I suggested he move out of the home
to at least
cal separation.
launch the
first
step of the initiation process
—physi-
His mother phoned me, upset, and said, "But you're
not thinking like a mother." "No, like his therapist." (I
that
parental
Ma'am,"
might have said "like a
would have made sense
I
replied,
"I'm thinking but
tribal elder,"
I
doubt
to her.)
Norman continued to vacillate between a dependency that frequently drove him home or to telephone his mother, and a rageful enervation that followed each contact with her. One While
in analysis
might say that his soul was up for grabs.
blame
his
or his passive father,
would be
It
would be easy enough
to
unconscious mother, for she certainly baited traps for him,
to
who
provided no model of
initiation.
But
undermine Norman's personal responsibility and
that
task: to
hold the tension between his desire to become an adult and his fear of
independence. This tremendous struggle,
this daily vacillation,
was
dramatized in a very powerful three-part dream: I
am
at a drive-in
and
to the car
movie with male
friends.
get out to investigate.
I
Something has happened
Someone
hits
me
very hard in
the mouth. I
am
with
my
mother looking
My
her sympathy.
show I
tooth
in the mirror together.
falls out. It
can't be saved.
She expresses I go over and
the tooth to Keith Byars.'^'^
find Mrs. X.
I
say to her, "I
am
not a
little
me
boy. Treat
like a
man."
The dream says
it all.
It
shows Norman stuck
land of extended adolescence."^^
^^ Keith Byars gles,
^^
Norman's
Many
was
setting
in the
announces
highly-regarded running back for the
no-man's-
his situation
Philadelphia
Ea-
favorite football team, at the time of the dream.
as between and twenty-eight, given the absence of rites of passage adulthood. Norman was clearly pushing even these liberal limits. in
the helping professions currently define adolescence
the ages of twelve to
a
The
The Necessary Wounding in life.
he
is
The movie
drama where
theater suggests a projected interior
working with the mascuhne presence; however, there
is
a prob-
When
he makes a wounded. Before he began therapy Norman knew noth-
lem with the
move he
69
is
car, his
psychic process or mobility.
ing of male rites of passage, but his psyche, at the archetypal level,
knows, for
it
participates in the primal developmental process.
know
did not consciously
that ritual
wounding, sometimes
He
in fact the
knocking out of a tooth, was symbolic of sacrificing dependence on the mother. rate, his
While Norman's mother made
own
difficult for
him
lethargy stymied his growth as well. In the
seeks her sympathy, her commiseration time his split psyche is to
it
moves
to
—"poor baby." At
show "Keith Byars"
to sepa-
dream he the
the tooth,
same
which
say that in his personal and collective culture, his psyche fas-
tened on this athlete as a personification of male energy that might help combat the chthonic pull of the underworld.
Norman's
father
is
not present in the mirroring, but the football
player represents a male energy for which he longs and
whose
mation he needs. Ambivalence dominates, however, for part
of the dream
whom Norman
Norman
seeks the support of Mrs.
believed to be
X
affir-
in the third
neighbor
(a
more understanding and supportive
than his mother). Thus the dream does not represent a breakthrough.
At the end Norman
is still
This regressive force arises
soliciting
is
found
an older woman's approval.
in all
men, but here the pathology
from the near complete absence of positive male energy
Norman's
history.
When
such energy
is
present
it
counterbalance the regressive pull of the mother complex.
why Norman
considered the brief shoulder-to-shoulder
uncle as the best time of his
was overcome by failure
of nerve.
life.
in
helps model and
One
stint
sees
with his
Yet even that glimpse of maturity
the powerful energies of the
complex and
his
own
"^^
^^ In Grimm's "Iron Hans" fairy tale, the key to the wild man lies under the mother's pillow. The youth cannot ask her for the key, for she will not give it must be stolen in order it. She wishes him to remain by her side. And so to unlock the energies of adulthood. (See below, pp. 92-94, for further consideration of "Iron Hans.")
The Necessary Wounding
70
absence of
In the
Norman's to
grow
plight
up,
is
know
rites
help
somewhat
to
their identity.
less
and
less
today.
They
tribal elders,
are expected
An
older male therapist
may
provide support and encouragement, but weekly
enough and,
in
any case, lack the numinosity of
Norman,
traditional initiation rites.^^
spend
many men
to
themselves, serve and maintain the tribal culture,
and be comfortable with
sessions are hardly
of passage, in the absence of
common
did eventually
for instance,
time with his parents, slowly growing less domi-
He now
nated by them and his parental complexes.
lives separately
and supports himself. But psychologically he has remained, essenthe uninitiated,
tially,
wounded male
Norman's missing tooth of creature comforts and a
This sacrifice
is
summons
is
symbolic of the sacrifice
to the rigors
of the journey.
a most powerful mythological motif, an archetypal
which requires
pattern
characteristic of our time.
dream
in the
that
something be given up for something
to
be gained. Childhood dependency must be relinquished for adult
The longing
self-possession and creativity.
for a trouble-free exis-
tence must be put aside in favor of the mature meeting of responsibil-
Such changes constitute not only the quickening of conscious-
ity.
summoned
ness but a form of election. All are
up
to the task. Initiatory
come
—
the
wounding
to
mourns
also intuits the existence of a it is
grow
up; not
are
all
an adumbration of things
wounding ways of the world. When
kindergarten he not only
natural as
is
to
the child goes off to
the loss of the protective hearth, he
more
to fear that world,
difficult
he
own adulthood. When I was an adolescent, and
is
and dangerous world. As
obliged to enter
it
if
he
is to
claim his
football in high school
a fingernail torn off.
and college.
As
I
against parental advice,
On
I
played
the first day of practice
had
I
stood on the sideline and commiserated
with myself, a senior tackle came over and said, to the best of recollection, "If
worse." ^^
As
ritual
only
I
you can't stand
felt at that
moment
and Such
talk.
rebirth, or
you won't stand the
a kind of
constructive and supportive
burial
that,
male
as therapy
my
gets
love, a friendly encour-
may
be,
swinging from the pectorals.
talk is necessary,
rest. It
and healing, but
it
it
does not involve
No
ecstatic
vision,
also takes longer.
The Necessary Wounding
He could easily have shamed me,
agement.
couragement. Even though I
deep drive
felt a
to play.
in
come
by the bigger guys.
abdominal pain from
I
When,
thumb,
felt
I
easily to mind.
Each Friday
that fear, but
at the
I
me
all
that
was
me
available to
by
would be doubled
I
afraid of being afraid
first year,
—
I
when we rite
my
broke
less.
knock heads with
to
My
lost.
of passage.
at the time,
I
afraid of
that dread
badge of courage, no
to sweat, collision and fear as a
parents could not understand, nor did
was
as en-
it
never missed a practice
my
was seeking male bonding
I
the guys, joke with them, cry together
drew
I
was more
end of
a symbolic victory, a red
Unconsciously,
was
I
overcompensated for
or a game. Like the Trojan Hector, than getting hurt.
often do to each
internalized
rather small for organized football,
entering the field of fear by choice.
over
men I
could not have expressed why.
motives
In retrospect, the
getting hurt
was
I
I
as
and
other, but his tone suggested helpfulness
71
was
psyche
What my
that football
in a mythically sterile time. In the
need for symbolic wounding, for association with male energy and camaraderie, and for a sulation of the
Just a
rite
of passage from childhood and the encap-
mother complex,
few years ago
football coach.
I
membered me and for the next play."
all
in
is
wrote
Maybe
You
early
to
life
me
my
had fought for the hurt,
somehow,
I
what
message
for
life,
but
it
after
of that message. I
set off to
I
way was
in the distance
My wife said how awful
replied that they
walk our dog.
field across the
We could see dim forms
privilege.
re-
you get up and get ready
had the boys out there on a holiday rather than with their families.
He
psyche dredged him up
Day my wife and
the faint cadence chant.
in Indianapolis.
since added, "That's
this is a simplistic
and the high school
shrouded with mist.
him
old college
Finding his ad-
thirty years.
get hurt and
a necessary one. Perhaps
recent Labor
was very
I
recounting his
those years to remind
One
football.
woke up having dreamt of my
I
learned from football.
surely
had was
had not seen him for
dress in the alumni journal,
we
all I
wanted
it
was
letting
to
be
It
still
and hear
that the coach
them be home
there, that they
did not add that they also wanted to be
in the daily collisions, that they
needed each other,
72
The Necessary Wounding
that
it
was about love somehow, and
fathers there in the mist.
would be able
make
to
inner dragons in
I
it
that they
did not add
all
clear. Indeed,
my own analysis did
I
were looking
that for
not until
I
did not believe
realize that
I
had never done field
of play
my thumb.
and break
On such
fields
the forgotten
what
rite
the youth
feel that
seeking, though he
is
He
of passage and the lost fathers.
Jung's terms, the symbolic people
I
had confronted the
I
anything wiser or more necessary than go out on a green
is
for their
life.
Meaning only comes
they are living the symbolic
in the divine drama. "^^
The youth
is
life,
knows is
it
not,
seeking, in
"when
to us
that they are actors
however cuUuraUy
seeking, in
attenuated a form, images that will attract his libido and channel
it
to
serve his development and his community. His need to individuate
is
profound and has an archetypal urgency. Without such images and rites
he
is
He
bereft.
will
spend
his time in depression, or take drugs
Like Norman, he will stay suspended as a child-man, macho overcompensation. He will believe that his masculinity is proved by bedding women, driving a high-powered car or making lots of money. Underneath he knows the truth, of course, to kill the pain.
or engage in
and he
is
desperately afraid of being found out; he believes himself
an impostor
in the
Those same
many
to
admit
salubrious
man's sense of has not at
it,
of green are experienced by
No man felt
No male felt
I
have ever met,
if
he
all
men
is
to stir
client
with
in
honest
a great deal of shaming as a man.
power of wounds
self.
The
growth can also damage a
whom
I
have ever worked
inadequate or shamed. Most had vivid
failure, like the
game, or when they
and
fields
has not
some time
memories of
fields
on
different forums.
enough
same
company of men.
trials
time they dropped the ball and lost the
failed to
make
the team. For boys, such green
their analogue, dusty playgrounds, are the arena for testing
and for shaming.
What man does not remember the slogans on walls? "No pain. No gain." "When the going gets
^1 See above, note 12.
the locker
room
tough, the tough
'
The Necessary Wounding get going."
tumble?
Who
73
does not remember childhood games of rough and
One man who had
reer always referred to
led a very distinguished, high-profile ca-
what he
called
"The Red Surrender." When
named Red had
he was around nine years old a bigger kid
down on
the playground and heaped dirt
laughed.
No
how
matter
on
held
him
his face while the others
great his achievements in the adult world,
"The Red Surrender" remained
his mythically defining
moment.
What man does not recall being called a "sissy," or, worse when I was a child, a "jelly"? These wounds are permanently lodged in a man's psyche and much of his adult life may be spent jousting with the armored ghosts of humiliations past.
Alas, he
shamed
may
further.
not speak of this shame, this humiliation, lest he be
And
this is the fourth great secret
collude in a conspiracy of silence whose aim
emotional
Every last
men
is to
truth.
man
will recall times
when, as a boy, as a youth, or even
week, he dared reveal himself and was shamed and
mask
learns to stuff that shame,
cover.
carry: they
suppress their
Along the way he
his pain, his protest.
in
isolated.
He
male bravado and cover, cover,
frequently degraded and unable to speak
is
The
it
play,
and
later film.
Glengarry Glen Ross,
dramatizes the humiliation of the sales force of a real-estate company, fully
grown men abusing
the other
their
cheek while trying
who
male colleagues
to beat
each other
and turn
suffer
at the selling
game:
to
the top salesman a Cadillac, to the second a paltry set of steak
knives, and the fourth
was
to
be unemployed. In such ways
is
shame
swallowed and isolation deepened. The shaming and the secrecy have gone on since childhood, so
own
degradation. This keeps
men become
accomplices
them from embracing
their own splintered selves. Men are often amazed by the willingness
in their
either their bro-
ken brothers or
pain.
Even
as a therapist
I
takes
Hopcke goes so
men a year in
women
to share their
have been impressed by women's capacity
to gain access to their inner truth
therapist Robert
of
and
articulate
it
to another.
Jungian
far as to say that in his experience
therapy to reach the point where
begin, in terms of being able to express
women
what they are
it
usually
really feel-
The Necessary Wounding
74
ing.^2
Men will
express their frustration or speak of a problem "out
there," but they are
world. Such
seldom able
to articulate the reality
the legacy of the
is
shaming and
of their inner
self-alienation they
have accrued since childhood.
Two examples will suffice. One is the man who came to see me at demand of his wife and condescendingly noted the pres-
the express
ence of a box of
tissues. ^3
They served
and
tears within himself,
to
remind him of the lake of
were quickly
his old defenses
and
Predictably, he lasted about three sessions in therapy, riage only
two months longer.
but upon reflection
wounded
that he
terribly isolated
for all the
had
felt
I
I
found myself quick
his
mar-
judge him,
His maleness was so
sorry for him.
to clothe himself in a
man. The innocuous box of
shame and
to
activated.
macho
cloak.
He was
a
tissue served as a spark
and fear he had suffered. As a consequence
risk
of his self-alienation he could hardly have a safe and trusting
rela-
tionship with his wife. Instead he sought to control her.
On another occasion, felt
while counseling a policeman and his wife,
I
how much he worried how he daily had to deal He was very much the battered,
genuine sympathy for his description of
about money. At the same time he described
scum of the wounded male of whom with "the
only to crush his
spirit,
earth." I
have been speaking. His wounds seemed
not free
him
for
new
consciousness. Several
times he had lashed out at his wife, hitting her once, and feared he
might do the same
up and came
would have
to his daughter.
straight at
hit
At one point
me to make a point;
me. The battered man, with
The willingness of women ated. In
spouse
my
means
far better than
he got
had moved he
to
speak his pain.
to risk their inner truth,
women are much women adjust to divorce
which men
less likely to feel alien-
that
experience,
if I
his battered inner child,
can only batter others because he cannot bear
generally lack,
in the session
think
I
do men. Perhaps they
cause they have learned along the
way
^^ Men's Dreams, Men's Healing, ^^ See above, pp. 43-44.
12.
p.
or the loss of a
feel less
abandoned be-
to establish a relationship with
The Necessary Wounding their
far
own
inner
network of
ive
more Hkely
a dark
more
Certainly they are
life.
have a support-
likely to
friends. After divorce or a partner's death, a to neglect his health
room with
and a
a bottle
and become depressed,
TV
dinner.
And
he
75
is
sitting in
more
is
man
likely to
rush out and find a replacement as soon as possible, just to avoid the loneliness.
Men's nian
up shortly
mortality rate shoots
after retirement, apparently
immune system is depressed. Perhaps also the wound, that a man is to be judged by his productivity,
because
their
sions a great lost of self-esteem. All his
work.
If
obliged to support, he would be a lazy
life
he has been told he
whom
he stopped working, or supporting those
bum,
who
left his
a wage-slave a
before being
shamed
Our culture longer have
to
his
he
is
Gauguin
make his mark in Fiji; but few can pull it man may be degraded, but he will accept that to
as nonproducing.
offers a delusory out: "At 65, or thereabouts,
work
is
became
family,
the patron saint of Switzerland; the French painter Paul
As
occa-
shamed and shunned. He would be
irresponsible. St. Niklaus,
abandoned wife and kids off.
Satur-
to
prove your worth.
you no
Now you can retire honor-
ably from the field and, without any preparation of your soul along the way, St.
you can play out your days
shuffleboard in Sun City or
at
Petersburg." Fueled by economic need, and even
fear of shameful inadequacy,
we
are
all,
in the
more by
the
haunting words of
Philip Larkin,
men whose
first
coronary
is
coming
Christmas
like
—who
drift,
loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted
by everything
What
the
that
modem man
once made
most
without the transformation.
He
life
sweet.
suffers from, then,
without the godly vision.
no one can define
it
He
except in the most
move from boyhood
to
the
wounding
suffers the Satumian burden of
definition that confines rather than liberates. in the soul
is
is
He
suffers the skewers
asked to be a
trivial
of terms.
manhood without any
role
rites
He
man when is
asked to
of passage, with
The Necessary Wounding
76
no wise elders
and
to receive
what such manhood might
instruct him,
and no positive sense of
His wounds are not transforma-
feel like.
they do not bring deepened consciousness; they do not lead
tive;
to a richer life.
They
him
senselessly, repeatedly, stun
him
numb-
into a
ing of the soul before the body has had the good sense to die.
Richard fronts
is
a lawyer in a large firm.
on himself. Richard with the image
him, that he
is
may
in terror
and thinks,
this
work do not
when an
have
"I'll
intruder enters. Richard
frozen
is
up and defend our house." He
to get
A year later he dreams of another intmder,
time moves toward his daughter's room. Richard gets up
with a baseball bat.
after the intruder
and protect
his role in life is to provide for afraid, inadequate, not fully a
he sees someone beating someone assailant chases him.
takes to
is
my
"We
else.
fight.
I
dazed, but he gets control of shoes.
No one
his family.
insistent. In
He
yells,
He
feels
in his care.
to a
another dream
kick him in the balls.
me
that
"Leave him alone." hit
I
him
and torments me. Then he
can help me." Again, Richard
defend himself and those
is
man. He confessed these thoughts
dreams were so
therapist only because the
and he
it
respect
Richard's understanding of these recurrent dream images
The
con-
and puts
not be pulling his weight. Similarly, he dreams that
shouts, "Get out of here!"
and goes
man
that a
his face
dream. His association
feels humiliated in the
the fear that his colleagues at
he and his wife are asleep
who
He dreams
Arnold Schwartzenegger, pulls the skin off
feels
unable
His tormentor steals his
shoes, his grounding, his standpoint.
in
Or consider Allen, an emergency room physician. He dreams he is a room with other youngish men. All of them are successfully
shooting arrows.
how
He
has to do this too, but no one will
or what to shoot
show him
Finally he does shoot his arrows, but he
at.
has no sense of whether they have hit the target or not. Then the
scene shifts and he tles
with one that
is
in a
swamp
crawling with alligators.
trymg
to pull
him under.
is
ages to escape and reach a
mud
flat
young men
wres-
man-
where he
ment. Apparently Allen's psyche longs for a that other
He
Full of terror, he will
rite
be safe for a mo-
of passage.
are already engaged, but there
is
He
sees
no elder
to
The Necessary Wounding instruct.
He does
not even
77
know what the target is or whether his As a consequence he is swamped,
halting efforts are rightly directed. a powerful
symbol of the undertow of the unconscious. Without the dreamer is in the death grip of the maternal mon-
helpful father, the
mother complex, which threatens
ster, his
mud
he clambers onto a
Notice that these two
flat,
he
is
men are
him under. Though
to pull
only temporarily safe.
fearful of tests of their
endow
in professions that culturally
them with considerable empowerment. Yet both manhood. They long
feel
unworthy and
for the help of others
over the great divide; they suffer wounds without illumination or transformation.
hood haunts
The absence of meaningful dreams, just as
their
Again, only by fidehty to the inner
dreams with
respect,
rites
of passage to man-
does those of so
it
life,
for instance
however unpleasant
by
many men.
treating their
the message, will they be
able to bring their secret fears to the light of consciousness.
As
a consequence of missing rites of passage,
masculinity. circle the
They
wagons, someone
destroy them. Or,
one
will
prove
it,
feel that
however
tightly they
will break through
life will shift
the context,
again and
And once you have
someone
else will
level,
man and even know how
is:
be a
change
"arrived," the rules will
be better than you. This protean, shape-
changing definition of masculinity obliges sona
to
and humiliate, even
but the rules shift constantly so you don't
game.
their
change the game, and
be proven incompetent. So the double bind
to play the
men doubt
have been able
men
to function at the per-
defining their reality primarily in terms of collective pa-
rameters such as salary, car, home, social status.
The
fragile
psyche of
Historically he has
man
has been brutalized and trivialized.
been conditioned
to procreate
and protect
brood, and to be defined by his productivity. All that says
little
his
or
nothing about his soul, his personhood, his uniqueness. In such a
world
men
are tragically
doomed; they cannot achieve
dom operate out of inner conviction, and game. Even when they win, they lose
Thus
modem men
cient myth, that of the
serenity, sel-
rarely get out of the killing
their soul.
recapitulate the timeless lineaments of an an-
wounded
Fisher King, Amfortas.
The
tale
of
78
The Necessary Wounding
Amfortas, whose name derives from French enfertez, "infirmity,"
many
has been told many,
times,
from various versions of the me-
dieval Grail legend to Robert Johnson's
modem
derstanding Male Psychology. The central point suffered a terrible testicles.
He
wound, variously described
is
that
a
It is
medieval symbol for container of soul. Though
Grail,
may have
Amfortas has
as to the thigh or the
wounded in his place of generativity, wound that will not heal unless he
has been
of his maleness.
account in He: Un-
a big car in the castle garage and walls
the seat find the
modem man
adomed with
the
trophies of corporate success, he intuits his emptiness, his pain, the
wound
that will not heal.
ated and the ramparts
However magnificent
on which he nervously
the castle he has cre-
strides,
he knows he
is
the lord of emptiness, his realm an emotional wasteland.
This recurrent mythic motif hovers in the background of TS. Ehot's great twentieth-century poem, "The Wasteland." London, the center of commerce and man-built stmctures, the center of the game, is
dubbed an Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many. I
had not thought death had undone so many.^"^
At msh hour Eliot sees not the enterprise of life but
Thus he into the
ironically quotes Dante's
Infemo
six centuries before ("I
undone so many").
If the
world
spiritual death.
shocked sentence as he walked had not thought death had
men have made and
serve does not
among the hosts of the dead As Joseph Campbell explained it.
serve them, then they are
land of the soul.
The Wasteland
...
is
any world in which
.
.
.
in the
waste-
force and not love, in-
doctrination, not education, authority, not experience, prevail in the
ordering of lives, and where myths and
rites
enforced and received are
consequently unrelated to the actual inward realizations, needs, and potentialities of those
upon whom they
are impressed.^^
^^ "The Wasteland," lines 60-63, in The Complete Poems and Plays, ^^ The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, p. 388.
p.
39.
The Necessary Wounding
79
When outer myth and inner truth conflict, one suffers a wound of Men surely suspect that attaining material success and
the soul.
power-laden status will not bring them inner peace, but they are afraid to get out of
town. So the
wound
new
festers without
know, the only game
As he watches
young man who,
a
dream he
a theater. To
is in
meeting and courting on the silver
his parents
the film he realizes they are
making
a terrible
mistake, a mistake from which he, of course, will one day result.
stands up and shouts that the film must be stopped.
by the usher who admonishes him
firmly,
even
You
other people aren't around!
if
"You
will
do what you should do, you can't carry on that out
Thus the youth,
at the
And just so do many men carry
that will
collision
life
you
will find
awaiting him as their child.
and rage
between outer images and inner
dilemma
for
men. The man
—
that the fa-
that
hammer
been. This collision,
felt in
truth creates
an im-
in the gray flannel suit, the or-
represent
all
conform, to distort the soul, even as that of
body and
enormous pressures
women
has so often
not also in the con-
spirit if
scious mind, leads to another male truth that
rather less than a se-
is
Men 's lives are violent because their souls have been violated.
Men's violence breaks out psychic contagions such as
any
you do not
shape him. Rejecting his
a secret sorrow
ganization man, the team player
in
like this,
if
into shape, are not in accord with the truth in their soul.
possible
cret:
can't act like this
be sorry
and cultural ethos, the images and expectations
The
to
He
accosted
is
onset of his chronological adulthood, sees
mythos
parents before his birth, he rejects the
them
He
soon enough."^^
the burden of the family
milial
in
vision, without healing.
twenty-first birthday,
amazement he sees
screen.
as far as they
is,
Delmore Schwartz describes
In a short story
on the morn of his his
what
man and one
mountain of
in
random
mob
its
murder and
rape,
and
action and wars. Dig deeply into
will quickly find not only that lake of tears but a
rage, layers of anger
slowly pushing
acts of
magma toward
accumulated since childhood,
the surface, there to erupt.
^^ "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,"
in
The World
Is
a Wedding.
80 The Necessary Wounding I
once
sat with a
man who had
taken over his father's plumbing
business when the elder's health declined. He worked sixty hours a week for forty years, protected his parents and allowed them to die in some modicum of material comfort. Then he protected his two sons
from the Satumian rack where,
Gerard Manley Hopkins's words,
in
smeared with
"All is seared with trade; bleared,
toil; /
and wears
man's smudge and shares man's smell."^^The sons, protected remained
at
home, dependent and demanding. At the
would erupt and scream
cation he
threaten. His rage to others,
was
at his
poor wife, storm and
the anger accumulated
given to Saturn.
And
from a
given
life lost,
obeyed sacrosanct
yet he had
thus,
slightest provo-
cultural
values: take care of your parents, provide for your family, pass
on a
He did everything he was supposed to do own life, and he was full of rage. Another man I knew had devoted his life to the making of international peace. He was a widely traveled negotiator, director of a re-
better life to your children.
except live his
spected think tank on conflict resolution.
he never raised his voice. At was. Then he told
me
first
that at least
I
I
never saw him angry and
was perplexed
at
where
the only person his fine sensibility
ground
anger
once a month he was wiped out by
migraines. His legitimate, honest anger turned inward.
One Monday morning at
his
would allow
—
He
attacked
himself.
rush hour, along with other commuters,
to a halt in the Philadelphia traffic
—
a gridlock
I
from which no
one would move very soon. At the intersection two men got out of expensive cars, and, clad
and shook to
their fists.
mention what lay
tapped and burst Similarly, football
pot, fight
in
screamed
at
each other life,
not
wait at their respective offices, had been
always on edge while attending Philadelphia Eagle
life is in
lots,
and
danger. So
each other or anyone I
ties,
forth.
am
passerby's
daughter and
and
suspect that their accumulated rage at
I
games. In the parking
cially, the
and
I
in suits
in their
counted sixteen fights
^^ "God's Grandeur," lines 6-7,
in
in the
in
cheaper seats espe-
many men,
fueled by
brew
way. At one game
my
our section of the stadium.
Norton Anthology of Poetry,
p.
855.
The Necessary Wounding 81
On another occasion my wife and I were threatened directly because we had allegedly parked our car too close to the van of some yahoos who had started their bread and wine before the game. Another time an elderly man who had dressed as a native American during an Eagles-Redskins game was beaten up inside and again later outside some reason he expressed no of Brotherly Love again. the stadium. For
What do
these examples illustrate? For the
week before jobs,
game
the
low pay,
little
stylized violence,
They
a
young
football fans the
Satumian round of boring and oppressive
expectation of change, a circus-like setting of
and the ministrations of booze
the venting of anger. to play out.
is
desire to visit the City
They
is
a witch's
are angry at the roles they
are angry at
mother complex. Each
—
angry
women at
because of
brew
for
seem doomed
their
unconscious
being a man, and, unconsciously,
acts out his rage
climbs the building, kicks the football, boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.
.... Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope Tl-embles and shows the darkness beneath.
The
strutting
show-off is
These working-class lads
terrified.^^
will Hkely
remain trapped forever within
They will beat their women, drink to mask their pain, suspect each other, ever isolated and afraid. Their more educated or privileged brothers will be successful by societal
the Satumian wheel of fate.
parameters. But they too, in their leased limos, their Brooks Brothers suits, their
executive suites, will have succumbed to the infantility of
power, the only game they know. Since their rage truthfully lest they
is
monumental, and since they cannot speak
be shamed, most modem men
it
drift further into
tum their rage on themselves. They do work out until they drop. They must reach
isolation. Accordingly, they
drugs, drink too a place
much
where they
feel
or
no pain, where they can slow down. Many of
^^ Delmore Schwartz, "The Heavy Bear," to Poetry,
pp.
309-310.
in
Modern Poems: An
Introduction
82
The Necessary Wounding
them
are workaholics;
mands of
their
honorably
fall
know
that
anima.
into
work keeps them from confronting
Work
drains and fatigues
bed exhausted. You don't have
them to
till
the de-
they can
be a therapist
to
may somatize or become depression. much of popular psychology usefully, if
anger turned inward
Since stress
measurable,
is
management. Heart and blood pressure
superficially, teaches stress
and stomach and headache pathologies are the children of not a shorter
life
span also pathological?
Think of those pretty smart guys,
nifty beer
commercials, put together by some
showing men laboring together at logging camp or
high in a skyscraper. Then,
and they're off
stress. Is
to the local
"It's Miller
time by Bud's early Lite!"
watering hole, to "happy hour," where
with a blond or brunette anima they can afford to feel what was not felt that
What
day.
ported by male agencies.
coming
The
a
happy band of brothers
community
like Christmas."
secure, free
in the alcohol paradise
truth is that they too are
and sup-
envisioned by ad
men "whose
first
coronary
is
Their hearts have been under attack long be-
fore the cardiac arrests to is
—
—
which Philip Larkin's poem
alludes. Theirs
the loneliness of the long-distance runner.
The Satumian rack
Every
turns.
man
is
on
not quicken consciousness or bring wisdom.
it.
Their
wounds do
They merely cause pain
without meaning. The anesthetic of work, the numbing of narcotics,
—
all wounds wounds are barbarous, soul-less. men be wounded to help them break free
be they chemical or ideological, the terror of loneliness without transformation. Such Yes,
it is
necessary that
from the Mother. But growth. Today's tion troubles
man
it is
necessary also that those
suffers his
in isolation,
further
but his reac-
and damages those around him. He must begin by
knowledging the wounds he life, if
wounds
wounds
ever he
is
carries,
wounds
ac-
that leak daily into his
to heal himself or help his worid.
4
Father Hunger
All imagos are two-sided. If an image has a depth dimension
it
must
express the dual character of reality. Acknowledging and maintaining the tension of opposites
is
a fundamental Jungian tenet. One-sided-
ness begets distortion, perversion, neurosis. Thus, for example, the
archetype of the mother expresses the dual aspect of nature, that
which giveth and sents a
life
that
which taketh away. The Great Mother repre-
force that both begets and destroys, gestates and annihi-
As Dylan Thomas
lates.
so succinctly put
the green fuse drives the flower ...
energy
—no wonder he has
But father can also
my
is
So, too, the archetype of the father
is
it,
"The force
that
through
destroyer."^^
dual. Father gives
life,
light,
been associated with the sun.
historically
blast, wither, crush.
The
preliterate
mind, playing
with the image of the sun as center of energy, the vitalizing principle,
God
evolved
the Father
who
energizes and fecundates the feminine
worship of Earth Mother with
earth. Patriarchy replaced the
Sky
Father. (The halo associated with Christ
that of
a relic of the solar
is
aura of the Father even as the serpent associated with the maternal
spumed by
deities is
the emergent patriarchy in Genesis.)
experience of the father
is
support, the energizing of his
outer world.
psyche
is
own
modem
Through
empowerment
negative, the fragile
his
is
a set of potential-
by the affirmation and modeling of the
mother he may experience the world as a nur-
to enter the
From
world and
^^ "The Force That Through the p.
is
metaphor, the child's psyche
turing and protective environment.
Poetry,
resources and modeling in the
the experience of the father
a data base to be shaped
parents.
the
crushed.
To use a ities,
When
When
positive, the child experiences strength,
Green
1176.
83
father he
may
to fight for his life.
Fuse,"
in
Norton
receive the
Of course
Anthology
of
84 Father Hunger
mother can help empower him and father nurture him, but archety-
Mother
pally they play specific roles.
also activates the
which must be transformed and transcended
plex,
childlike
and dependent.
He must
ant of
he remain
leave the world of the mother and
mythology
enter that of the fathers. All
mother com-
lest
is
a playing out of
some
vari-
two great mythologems. The mythology of the Great Mother
the great circle, the death-rebirth motif, the Eternal Return.
mythology of the Sky Father cence
to experience,
is
from dark
the quest, the journey to light,
from home
is
The
from inno-
to the horizon.
Each mythic cycle must be served.
When the parental imagos
in the child are inadequately
the parents, he carries the deficit throughout his
life.
modeled by
He
longs for
something missing, even as he might carry a vitamin deficiency and
He unconsciously seeks the dormant energies of his psyche through others. He may impose the nurturant role on his wife, for example, and be angry when she does not mother him even though consciously he would not let her. Or he may relinquish his own private journey to serve another man's, unconsciously seeking the missing father imago. He may be full of rage for the failure of his father to father, or for the absence of cultural fathers, or he may carry crave a certain food.
a secret grief for his lost father. Just as
we
spent considerable time looking at the power of the
mother complex
knowledge
that
in a
man's
such power
life is
pletely activated father imago.
among
other things,
child. If
power
he
will
is
is
the personal father
must
be,
and
missing, literally or psychologically, the mother's
be unbalanced. Or
power
What
the third point in the triangle of parents
mother complex, the father familial
two chapters ago, so we must ac-
rendered even greater by the incom-
if,
unduly influenced by his
own
acts in a brutal, repressive fashion as the
broker, he similarly fails to
prochement with the feminine
that the child
model a healthy
rap-
needs to witness. The old
father-knows-best family model was too one-sided to be healthy.
Few of
us grew up seeing our parents as equal agents, democratic
forces balancing, supporting, In
Finding Our Fathers,
complementing each
other.
Sam Osherson cites a broad study
indicat-
Father Hunger 85 ing that only seventeen per cent of American tionship with their fathers. In
men had
most cases the
a positive rela-
was dead,
father
di-
vorced and missing, chemically impaired or emotionally absent.^^ this
amazing
tragic has
statistic is
happened
to
even close
one of the
something large and
to the truth,
critical
If
balances of nature. Indeed,
Robert Bly asserts that the father-son relationship
is
the
most dam-
aged of all relationships since the industrial revolution.^^
Thus
the seventh great secret that bedevils the
carries a deep longing for his father
When
when
a
where the jobs were, when father
fice.
was
in the fields, in
No more
craft,
Perhaps he had a few on the
no more the bonding of
way home. James Joyce
who, having been trashed by by a woman, walks
his friends, rejected
reason," beats his son.
on the only one over
The
in the
home
tells
the
scorned by
house and, "for no
degradation of his soul that day
whom he still has
Fathers so often return
his boss,
is
visited
power.^^
dispirited
and soul-worn. They can
hardly model a positive masculine imago for their sons feel the
to the
the shared
of the assembly line or the paper shuffling of the of-
story of a father
Satumian oppression so keenly. There
blaming
man
dragged himself home from a brutalizing
his dad. Father
in the heat
each
home and went
left
behind.
left
no more the transmission of one's
boy with
day
soul:
the family left the land and migrated to the
factory and the office, the son toil,
male
tribal fathers.
and sons stopped working together
fathers
the small trades, cities
and for his
his father, for his father could then
is
when in a
man
his father.
The
no point
blame
they
chain of cause and effect reaches back to the beginnings of industrial
and urban man. the chance for
scarcely
When the tribe was
man-to-man transmissions was
virtually lost.
We
can
go back to tribalism, although one feature of the men's
movement has been
to try to recapture a sense
chanting, and by bringing
^ Finding
absorbed into the larger society,
Our
^^ Iron John:
Fathers, p.
men
18.
A Book About Men.
^2 "Counterparts,"
in
of it by drumming and
together to share their stories.
pp.
19ff.
The Portable James Joyce, pp. 97-109.
86 Father Hunger Certainly the idea of activating a positive masculine
and male bonding experiences do further
propriate
most men
will never
many who
are, the effect
be exposed
to
their father
So
all
Literature
his loss.
it
They long
What
And tribal
or not, hunger for for his body, his
wisdom. of illustrations of the search that transpires within
is full
the youth for the activation of the masculine principle. is
ap-
But
be passed on to his son.
men, whether they know
and grieve over
strength, his
ple
last.
look to corporate boardrooms or the church for the
fathers today.
is
such opportunities, and, for
of the group experience does not
father cannot access in himself cannot
we cannot
imago
that goal.
A fine exam-
Franz Kafka's short story "The Judgment,"^^ where the per-
sonal father complex
is
extended to include his ambivalence toward
the patriarchs of his Judaic heritage
and even
to
Yahweh
—stem and
demanding, as well as absent and unavailable. In the story a father.
the
He
young man
suffers under the omniscient eye of his
has secretly been writing to a male friend in Russia. (For
Prague-bom Kafka, Russia,
at the
beginning of
would have represented something akin
to
this century,
our nineteenth-century
"wild west," a land of frontier adventure.) The friend
urging the
is
youth to join him. Obviously the youth longs for adventure and eager to accept the
summons
his father finds the
cache of
you
to die."
The son
to
joumey from home
letters.
He
to horizon.
jumps
to his death in the river.
This denouement shocks the reader. But Kafka, said stands in relationship to our age as
tradition,
city tive,
penned
in
whom
Dante did
an unparalleled writer of parables. Kafka's stories are secret self,
But
says to the son, "I sentence
dutifully treks through the city, crosses a
bridge, and, at story's end,
Auden
is
W.H.
to his,^"^ is
letters to his
an effort to escape an iron father and stultifying
though death seems the only escape from the grim, gray
of oppression.
By what power, what
authority,
even what mo-
can the father exercise such an effect over his son? Just as a
^^ In The Penal Colony, pp. 49-66.
^ The Dyer's Hand,
p.
159.
Father Hunger 87
glance at Medusa's face would turn
ogy, so
we have
in
men
negative father complex. This Satumian
over a son's
fall
mythol-
to stone in classical
"The Judgment" a portrayal of
the
shadow has
power of
the
the capacity to
and crush him. The son reaches out for a
spirit
positive masculine experience with his friend, but, for reasons not
explained, the father tumbles to his rival and shuts off his son's only
hope of escape. The complex, spirit, to
tamp
the fires of
life
power
then, has the
to cut off his
and plunge him into the obliterating
waters of the unconscious. So, instead of bringing his son
light,
the
father brings suffocating darkness.
Such negative mills."^^
They
burned
that
fathers built
what Blake
called the "dark, satanic
They
built arrogant theologies
also built Auschwitz.
men
at the stake
and crushed them on the wheel. They
have created an iron world without sons reach out for
life
light,
without soul.
Quite another example of the quest for the father Nathaniel Hawthorne's story,
"My
may be
streets are a
maze,
like the
where he goes he asks
Bostonians pull back from him. tion
is
brewing and
his
kinsman
own
kinsman and
He does is
seen in
a
not
is
know
much-hated
Boston, as-
he must
psyche. Every-
surprised to see that the
Revolu-
mob
howling
Only then does he
his
in their midst.
of
men
As He is
royalist official.
night falls his confidence and his consciousness diminish also.
swept up into a passing
A
whose winding
lost in the city
convolutions of his
for his
in
whom
hopes by his kinsman Major Molineaux,
Naive and innocent, he gets
find.
their
Kinsman, Major Molineaux."
youth named Robin sets off to find fame and fortune sisted he
When
they crush and destroy them.
Soon he
painted as savages. realize that
is
he has found
kinsman, tarred and feathered, no helping father but a broken old
man. Robin
is
and
he must make his
realizes
stunned
Hawthorne's story ure, a
mentor
complex
at finding the violence
own way
typifies a
of the
mob
for a father fig-
will help him over the bridge from empowered male world beyond. But,
^^ "And Did Those Feet,"
in
himself
in the world.
young man's need
who
to the
in
Norton Anthology of Poetry,
p.
his
mother
like
510.
most
88 Father Hunger
modem only a
which sive
men, Robin does not find the mentor he needs. He finds
wounded man thereafter he
shadow
Jugend was
projection that filled
fell
with youths
They responded
inner hero.
communal
like others,
and a darkness within himself
must carry consciously.
identification.
onto Hitler
who
to the
We might recall in the thirties.
a
is
The
mas-
Hitler
longed for the activation of their
summons
to ideals, sacrifice
The appeal of John Kennedy
idealism and heroic need
the
and
to youthful
more benign example. What Robin
found was that there were no helpful
abaissement
fathers, only the
du niveau mentale of the mob. In the end he
is
on
own.
his
A more positive outcome of the quest for a helpful male companion
is
seen
tagonist
is
in
Joseph Conrad's novella The Secret Sharer. The pro-
young captain taking on
a
China Sea. Nervous and insecure, he
his first tries to
command
in the
South
who back. He
befriend his crew
belittle him behind his knows only to be friend or tyrant, both extremes undermining his power to command. While walking the deck one night he sees a man
immediately smell his fear and
in the surf
and pulls him aboard. Instinctively he knows he must
harbor and protect this man. Later a ship pulls alongside, searching for a
man who
has acted boldly but murdered a shipmate.
captain, despite his duty to serve
The young
and support the law of the
sea,
cov-
I
ers for his mysterious visitor.
The man he young captain
fished from the sea lacks.
He
is
double. At story's end the
seems
in fact his
young
to
have
shadow,
all
his
the qualities the
Doppelganqer or
captain, having assimilated the
psychic influence of the fugitive, puts his ship through
some compli-
cated and perilous maneuvers in order to put the
man
safely ashore.
Out of these actions the crew comes
young
he has obviously grasped and thority necessary to exercise
What
the
shadow
What
potential.
at the
captain, for
the requisite moral au-
command.
young captain needed was not knowledge
ready learned that authority.
to respect the
now models
naval academy
—but
al-
inner strength, inner
the mysterious visitor represented
They shared
—he had
was
his
own
a secret, the secret that outer authority
must spring from inner authority. This secret sharing
is
the mentor-
Father Hunger 89
ing
all
thority,
men need. Since they are seldom able men must spend their lives deferring weight around
their outer
in
to feel their inner au-
throwing
to others or
compensation for
their sense
of inner
weakness. Unlike the Kafka story, where the negative father crushes
Hawthorne's where the mentor disappoints,
the child's spirit, or
Conrad's story
need something from
All sons
their father to
men have
mentoring.
illustrates positive
their fathers.
They
especially need
say he loves and accepts them as they are.^^ Too
many
distorted their individuation journey because their father
The sons
did not affirm them.
must adjust
naturally thought they
themselves, twist their nature, to win his approval. Often they win
approval by trying to
spend
their life
fulfill
the father's expectations.
ther's affirmation, they internalize this deficit as a
statement about themselves. ("If love. Since
I
Sometimes they
seeking that approval from others. Or, lacking the
do
not,
I
am
were worthy,
I
fa-
phenomenological
would have
I
his
unworthy.")
who for years had carried a deep sense of shame and low self-esteem. When his father was dying of emphysema the man asked, "Why were we not close to each I
recall
other?"
one man
The
in his late thirties
with perhaps forty-eight hours to
father,
"Do you remember when you were the toilet
on
and
I
had
to
ten
.
.
.
you dropped
spend the whole day getting
to recount similar incidents, all trivial.
alizing that his father's only gift
was
The son
to
it
left
Only
after this
a toy
out?"
down
He went
the hospital re-
demonstrate that he was
crazy. For almost four decades the son had thought he thy.
live, replied,
was unwor-
death-bed conversation did the son's wounded
self-image begin to heal.
Sons also need to
watch
to
show them how
to
back from adversity, nine, outer
and
inner.
be
their father in the worid.
in the world,
how
how
to
work,
They need him
how
to
bounce
to stand in right relationship to the femi-
They need
^^
the activation of their inherent mas-
As a therapist I have seldom witnessed more pain than that suffered by a man who never knew his father's love and approval. This wound is most keenly felt by gay men whose fathers, insecure in their own identity, re-
jected and
abandoned
their sons.
90 Father Hunger
by outer modeling and by
culinity both
boy not
to cry, not to
alienation.
—
is
to
one's
live
to
into the fray
Sons need
be afraid and, while
and
life
to
living his
life,
to
to
—
the necessary
be shown that
afraid, that
one
self-
how
emotions,
in his
to
woundit
is
per-
obliged to
is still
undertake one's journey.
have father
how
"out there," and
tell
them what they need
to
know
to live
with integrity. Sons need to see father
to live
struggling, being emotional, failing
When
up again, being human.
ting
be honest
what each son needs. He needs
human
fectly
only to further a life-long
sissy, is
up off the floor and back
get
ing
be a
Showing him how
direct affirmation. Telling a
and
falling, get-
the son does not see his father
honestly living his personal journey, then the son will have to find his
paradigms elsewhere,
ther's
or,
untaken journey. This
tion that the greatest
the parents. ^"7
worse, unconsciously live out the is
in
accordance with Jung's observa-
burden the child must bear
On this theme
fa-
the Rilke
poem
I
the unlived
is
life
of
quoted in The Middle
Passage merits repeating here: Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere
And And
his children say blessings
another man,
who
on him
in the East.
as if he
remains inside his
were dead.
own
house,
stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church which he forgot.^^
The church
to
which Rilke alludes emphasizes the sacred nature of
the journey. (As with Kafka, the
Prague-bom Rilke would see
the
"East" as the frontier.) In the one case the father takes his journey, albeit painfully so. In the other, the father stays
his children
Of course
must overcompensate
for
what he
left
home,
fearful,
and
undone.
the father's journey need not be a literal departure, but
each
man must
rity,
from
depart in
his silent
some way from
mother complex,
^^ See above, pp. 54-55. ^^ Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke,
p.
if
the collective,
he
49.
is
to
from secu-
become
himself.
Father Hunger 91
When
he does not, in whatever way, blaze his
dense
forest,
own
trail
through the
he becomes part of the psychic entanglement hindering
his son's journey.
A father may sence
may be
often
it
is
be physically present, but absent
literal
through death, divorce or dysfunction, but more
transmit what he also
may
most mothers
are,
tipped and the mother-
is
As
well intentioned as
they can hardly be expected to initiate their sons
something they are
Without a father
not.
him out of
to pull
mother complex, the son stays a boy, trapped either
macho suppression of
or compensatory
inability to
not have acquired. Dad's defection means
of the parent-child triangle
son dyad assumes a disproportionate weight.
into
and the
a symbolic absence through silence
that the balance
His ab-
in spirit.
confusion are then
liabilities
in
dependency
the feminine. His fear and
he must mask. The uninitiated male
hides his wound, his longing, his grief, a stranger to himself It is
this longing, this attraction
constellated in the
(looking
more
the
toward the
.
initiating male, that is
men's movement. Spokesmen such as Robert Bly
like
Moses than Charlton Heston), Michael Meade,
Sam Keen and James
Hillman, quite apart from what they
may
say,
symbolically evoke the wise elders. That Robert Ely's analysis of the fairy tale "Iron
become
the
John" (or "Iron Hans"
number one
seller
astonishing, especially since
cepts that are not
it
on the is
Grimm's
in
New
modem men's relationship to
list is
not easy to read and employs con-
common currency. But the
very fact that
motifs found such a ready response suggests for
would
original)
York Times book
it is
a
its
ancient
good paradigm
the primal masculine.
"Iron John" begins with hunters disappearing in the forest. Psychologically this
means
that
however competent
scious center of the personality,
Energy
is
wild ferric creature world.
As
creature
is
may seem
being robbed from conscious is
to be,
life.
the court, the con-
something
Upon
is
amiss.
investigation a
dredged up from a well, the deep, archetypal
consciousness
is
threatened by such obvious power, the
immediately caged. But the prince, the youth
who
repre-
sents the potential for growth in the kingdom, drops his golden
symbol of his psychic wholeness,
into the cage of Iron John.
ball,
92 Father Hunger Iron John
golden
ball.
tells
boy
the
But the key
must not ask
for the
to the cage
key since
his
dom; she does not want her son
The boy does
steal the
is
to
He
under his mother's pillow.
mother
will not give
become
a
man who
him
that free-
will leave her.
key and unlocks the cage. Iron John carries
him off and they undergo tures.
he frees him, he will return the
that if
a series of symbolic, transformative adven-
The mother's apprehensions were
accurate, for her son does
man. Of course
his actions are not hostile
leave her; he
toward
becomes
a
her, or the passive king, his father, but necessary initiatory
experiences. At the end of the story, the youth no longer needs Iron
John's assistance, for he has internalized that strength.
What that
it
is
so important about this story, as Bly rightly perceived,
boy must leave home psychologically help, for he
is
to
grow
also afraid of that archetypal
mother will cling is
is
provides a useful model of male initiation for our time. The
necessary to
him from
to her child to protect
become conscious.
up.
The
father
no
is
male empowerment. The the
wounding
that
Fortunately, the child has access
through the archetypal level to the masculine imago within. Like
most men today he must bypass
the personal father, overthrow the
seductive tyranny of his mother complex and seek the activation of his true nature at a
in
deeper
level.
It is
this
such myths and legends, as well as
in
men When the
process that speaks to
modem
movies.
youth does return to the court, after his wounding but subsequently victorious journey in the world, he
is
able to claim the princess as his
outer bride and also the anima within. Comfortable with the primal
masculine, he
is
able to accept the feminine.
Many women have
expressed their apprehension of the men's
movement and of the Iron John phenomenon that
such talk
is
a rationale for
men
in particular.
fear
to maintain, or regress to, the
caveman
attitudes that
the past.
But they are confusing, as many men have
task of
They
have been so oppressive, and often violent,
empowerment with
ered to be himself without
aggression.
shame
in
historically, the
The man who
or apology, without
empowmacho bluster feels
or overcompensation, has no need to be hostile and aggressive to-
ward
either
women
or other men.
Such a man has nothing more
to
Father Hunger 93 prove.
He
has been tested and proved worthy.
Women
also have criticized Bly and others for excluding
and for neglecting the father-daughter nexus. and perhaps
in
some women.^^ For now learn
The
latter
time will be addressed by men, as
seems
it
that
women
charge
it
is
true
has been by
men's most pressing task
what they can from each other about the masculine,
if
is to
and
may women need to learn about women from wise old women, when and wherever they may be found. Men and women may be more comfortable with each other wherever that
be learned. Similarly,
being
when they have become comfortable with themselves. One young man wrote of his experience after a men's I I
retreat:
am ancient red, orange and yellow. am animal man, your brother.
Through the pines and the palms I
learned
how
to see
The dimensions of wonder From the great chiefs of peace. There's a drumbeat in the forest
And flutes on the wind. I see men joining hands As brothers and friends. Go drumming my brothers
Any heartbeat you feel.'^^ Obviously the writer
Pan who,
felt
something
stir
deep within, the primal satyr
like Iron John, incarnates a lost
Another writer who has contributed
wounding of
modem men
is
masculine dimension.
to
our understanding of the
Jungian analyst Eugene Monick. In
Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine,
Monick
points out that the
disempowerment of the personal father causes a wound at the archetypal as well as the personal level. Unconscious men who suffer inner doubt, who feel helpless, have created the patriarchy, which oppresses other men, rapes
women and
despoils nature. Patriarchy,
^^ See, for instance, Linda Leonard, The Wounded Woman: Healing the Father-Daughter Relationship and Marion Woodman's books. Addiction to Perfection, The Pregnant Virgin ^nd Leaving My Father's House. ^^ Timothy Mollis, "Song to Pan." Personal communication.
94 Father Hunger
which has held sway
West
in the
for
compensation for inner weakness.
some
three thousand years,
Men brandish
spears, rockets
is
a
and
when they lack a positive phallic identity. Walk tall and big stick; maybe no one will notice how little you feel. Mon-
skyscrapers carry a
ick's thesis
a timely reminder that phallos
is
with the penis
—
—not
to
be confused
an archetypal force from which derives male po-
is
tency and largeness of soul.
Phallos,
and Male Rage: The Phallic Wounds a sequel to Monick argues that men suffer castration because the world
wounds
their sense
In Castration
of personal identity. The signs of
this are over-
compensation and an inflated power complex (think of Donald
Trump naming
his casinos after His
and the meteoric
rise
Men
rage, often directed outward.
lest
I
the
same way. Monick
primary enemy of men
of business empires), and
also reveal their
his father could barely hold his
shame him
that a
fall
One analysand
through timidity and shame.
abused by
Sameness, Wall Street scandals,
and subsequent
is fear,
I
disempowerment
met who had been
head erect and look too, as
I
at
me,
have here, asserts
fear of the feminine
and fear of
being wounded by other men. Patriarchy, which substitutes power for love
and measures worth
divine but
its
own erections,
In King, Warrior,
in material terms,
is
worshipping not the
a compensation for this
fear."^!
Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes
of the Mature Masculine, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette recognize the emotional immaturity of the patriarchy
on the other seek tioning.
to
make conscious
on the one hand and
four archetypes of male func-
Each of these archetypes has a positive and negative
The king control, to
impotence,
represents a
make is
side.
man's executive function, the power
decisions.
The shadow
virulent power.
own
He may
side,
when
to take
the king feels his
seek control over others to
deficits.
His bluster and bravado, power
lunches and big cars, are actually
symptoms of powerlessness, but
compensate for he
is
his
too terrified to turn within and settle accounts. Thus the king
archetype must be consciously
^^ See
owned
or a
man
will
be even more
James Wyly, The Phallic Quest: Priapus and Masculine
Inflation.
Father Hunger 95 susceptible to the depredations of the Saturnian patriarchy.
The warrior
what he
fight for
The shadow history has
own
their
represents the imperative that a
man be
prepared to
desires, for his integrity, for a cause or for justice.
side of the warrior
been drenched
in
the destroyer.
is
blood by
men who,
How much
of our
unable to fight for
indeed having none, projected their rage onto
truths, or
others and slaughtered them. All wars are civil wars
—men
against
their brothers.
The magician power of men
is
the archetype of the shape-changer, the protean
move mountains, to adjust to changed conditions, to find a way to make things work. As Sophocles noted twenty-five hundred years ago, "How numberless are the world's wonders / And none more wonderful than man."'^^ ^e who tamed the salt-churned seas, who built roads across the mountains, who wrenched from the to
Symphony,
wonder-worker
in
side, though, is control, manipulation, sleight
of
recesses of his soul the Fifth nature. His
shadow
hand and charlatanry. He edge along which
cal
wonders and
The
all
treating the
lover, too,
is
is
not to be trusted.
men
the
He embodies
the ethi-
walk, the fine line between working
world as a
walks a fine
line
shell
game.
—between
eros, the force for in-
terconnection, and narcissism, the need for egoistic gratification.
Men's hatred
is
well documented. But, wonderfully, they also love.
They love from
afar
and write the Commedia; they love God and
write Ad majoram gloria Dei.
War and Peace. They flesh ill
and
love
They love
women
also
stitute in
to the late
but
and children and
their souls in brute labor to
brothers and clean and comfort
may
deform
man and
their fellow
write
sacrifice their
support them. They love their
them as they
die of
AIDS. But they
that eros to terrible ends. Lecturing at the Jung In-
Zurich in 1978, Paul Walder related an anecdote attributed
former Swiss ambassador to Berlin. At a state reception
in the
1930s, Hitler reportedly said, "I should have been an architect,
now
it's
too late."
Each of these archetypes constitutes an energy-filled image. All
^^ Antigone,
in
The Complete Greek Tragedies,
p.
170.
96 Father Hunger
men carry them
within; they long for their inner activation and outer
manifestation. Alas, the personal father can never activate the full
range of archetypal empowerment. Thus men, in their hunger for thering, suffer their deficits in the recesses of personal
fa-
shame or seek
surrogate fathers in the dubious models so widely available. Clearly, in order to activate true
deep
well,
maleness, the images must be drawn from the
down where
Iron John lives, and not from the neurotic,
overcompensated, self-ahenating precincts of patriarchy.
The deep drama of the search
for the father transpires daily in ev-
why
Jungian analysts monitor the dream
ery man's
world
is
One
life.
reason
in order to track
such inner dramas. Often one can measure
change by the evolution of certain images or themes through the unfolding
own
dream
seems
life. It
healing even
that the
psyche
when consciousness
working toward
not yet ready to assist.
is
dream and assimilating
listening to the
is
its
By
energies, consciousness
its
can grow and faciUtate the larger motives of the psyche.'^^ In the last chapter
room
physician.'^'^
he, the
I
wrote of the wounding of Allen, an emergency
Allen
now knows what
he once suspected, that
son of two physicians, became one himself primarily to win His parents always made love conditional and ap-
their approval.
proval dependent on "meeting the program." Three of his dreams, scattered over a
twenty-month period, reveal
his evolving relation-
ship to the Satumian father. In the first ther.
and urns. the
dream he
The room
is
in a
A young man gives
musket and
room
that
he knows belongs to his
filled
him an old
fires at the vases,
dream ends with him tive
is
dark and oppressive,
feeling "silly,
flintlock musket.
shattering
and
fa-
with large antique vases
He
takes
some of them. The
slightly afraid, like a destruc-
youngster." Here the psyche places Allen in the confines of the
father
complex where, indeed,
The room
is
filled
all feels
dark and oppressive to him.
with "old stuff," the debris of childhood.
A
'•^ See, for instance, James A. Hall, Jungian Dream Interpretation: A Handbook of Theory and Practice, and Donald Broadribb, The Dream Story. ^^ Above, pp. 76-77.
Father Hunger 97
younger part of him, perhaps the rebellious
child,
perhaps the
him with an old weapon, perhaps the agency He expresses his anger by destroying the containers.
nascent future, presents
of an old anger.
Afterward, he feels like an adolescent acting out, self-righteous but slightly embarrassed.
In a is
dream a few months
under
artillery fire.
Allen follows him to
An
later
old
Allen sees himself on an island that
man
is
A shell
listen.
of the war and
telling stories
hits a
huge
tree that topples
on
man and kills him. Allen knows this tree is called "the soldier tree." The old man had been overbearing and not liked, but he had inspired achievements. Allen feels he might like to die this way also. Then he is among some branches and feels cool rain on his face. Many of Allen's dreams employed metaphors of warfare. While the old
he had never been
in the military,
Allen experienced himself as being
constantly "under fire," and certainly the emergency
room of an
in-
war zone. His schedule was frequently
ner-city hospital is a kind of
four days on and three off, and he always experienced anxiety before returning.
By
which he com-
the second day back he had adjusted,
pared to having been on leave and then returning to the trenches. In this
dream Allen
flood of his
life.
He
whom he has things is
ambivalent.
is
surrounded by water, by the emotional
drawn
is
to learn.
to the old
man, a combat veteran from
But the man
is killed.
Allen's reaction
The old man was oppressive and overbearing
had also inspired others lence toward his father.
to achieve.
He wanted
—but he
This reflected Allen's ambiva-
to love his father,
needed
to love
knew he had always had to work to He was also aware that he had accomplished a thanks to his father's expectations. At the same time there win
him, but he
his father's
grudging approval. great deal is
a kind of futility in the dream.
nothing will avert his death as the old
man
fate,
He
feels
he
is
called to this combat,
and he only hopes he can die a
soldier's
did. The thought offers a degree of comfort and
peace as the rain soothes him.
The death of
the old
man
suggests a development in Allen's psy-
che of which he was not consciously aware the old senex values that had governed his
—perhaps
life.
He feels,
the death of
as
many
be-
98 Father Hunger
him have, doomed
fore
may
resigned calm
He
dream, Allen
summoned
has been
promised
somewhat
with his boots on, but the measure of
augur a positive psychic
in fact
In a third related
orders,
to die
is
once again
before the general and has saluted, heard his
compliance. But, during the exchange, he
his
inappropriately, even defiantly, shining his shoes.
am
leaves he salutes again but says to himself, "1
am going over the
home
drop by his parent's that
same morning,
know now who
wardly salutes. But
for a fourth of July party.
leave
behind.
it all
Often
his
is in
Now
the old
life,
one
man
what one became, even the good from the wounded
cian to
win
fine,
his parents' approval.
caring physician
was
the parental
still
We out-
Now
that
his diver-
changes are
much
of what one did in
will
life,
came from the wrong became a physi-
results,
parts. Allen, for instance,
for a child but not healthy for
sion. His task
he
moment, but sometime soon he
realizes that
places,
announces
the psyche
saluting for the
in therapy
The dream,
clear that his rebellion, first seen in the
is
it
gence grows greater. is
I
Allen had been planning to
shooting of the vases in the earlier dream, continues.
He
As he
not here for long.
repeats the familiar military metaphor.
the general
imminent.
is
hill."
Ironically, after his analytic session
from
shift.
in a military setting.
Such
a motive
is
understandable
an independent adult. Yet Allen was a
who may in fact belong in the medical profeswho he was apart from the weight of
to find out
complexes
—what was
valid and
what was suspect
in his
professional choice.
Allen's predicament
have had share old
is
less
that they
men
is
demanding
of their
analogous to that of fathers,
some no
all,
but what they
cannot go to their personal father, nor to any wise tribe, to
ask the necessary questions. The "inven-
tion" of psychoanalysis a century that could not
many men. Some may
father at
ago was
in
response to suffering
be alleviated by medicine, by theology or by patriar-
When men's
wounded they respond in ways terrible to themselves and others. They can only change themselves and their society when they become conscious of their wounds. chal fathers.
souls are
Father Hunger 99
The
father-son
seldom able prophets,
wound goes son
to help, the
pop
-isms of
stars,
very deep. With the personal father
is
driven to pseudo-fathers kinds.
all
Few sons can
of his grieving heart.
Or he
—
religious
suffers in the privacy
bless their fathers as e.e.
cum-
mings does: though
dull
were
all
we
taste as bright,
bitter all utterly things sweet,
maggoty minus and dumb death
all
bequeath and nothing quite so
all
we
inherit,
least as truth
— say though hate were why men breathe i
because love
my father lived his soul
the
is
Cummings
whole and more than alP^
is
able to bless his father for, in the elder's capacity to
live his life fully,
he modeled and activated that mascuhne potential
the son.
Such a son
no
of his own,
fault
tions.
Thus
That place stands; I
the sons
is
in his
am frankly
travel to another place to
some guru
own skewered and alienated life
wounded generabegin the healing.
some corporate
lives or
lived under the
structure
soul.
pessimistic about the chances of
ing or transforming a clearly, social
but another in a series of
must
not where
is
it is
is
in
very lucky. For most men, the father, through
most men
shadow of
for escap-
Saturn. Yet,
change comes about through the awakened conscious-
ness of individuals.
When enough
their culture, values that
cur. Accordingly,
it is
damage
reject the values offered
the soul, then social
the task of
men everywhere
them by
change
will oc-
to attain a degree
of consciousness that enables them to heal themselves.
And
that
is
the eighth secret
men know:
if
they are to heal, they
must activate within what they did not receive from without. That
^^
"my
etry,
p.
is
the subject of our last chapter.
father
1046.
moved through dooms of
love,"
in
Norton Anthology of Po-
5
Men
Healing the Souls of
Before addressing the issue of healing, a mystery far more profound
and elusive than wounding, terial to this point.
nian
men,
When
carry.
it
think
I
it is
shadow under which we
that daily injure
men
While
live, the roles,
have raised them with
I
and
appropriate to review our ma-
expectations and values
does seem useful to
recall the eight secrets
men
silent heart.
Sometimes
a
conscious of them since childhood, but often that
prompts them
The Eight 1)
in the
context of
acknowledged having such thoughts
friendship or therapy, each has in his frightened
it
hardly necessary to rehearse the Satur-
to surface out
man it is
has been acutely
our conversation
of inchoate emotional confusion.
Secrets
Men 's lives are
as
much governed by
restrictive role expectations
as are the lives of women. This assertion requires perhaps the least amplification, for the vast personal and social pathologies of our time are the cri de coeur of individual souls deformed by the procrustean roles established by patriarchal thinking.
As
Rilke observed, "We're not at home, not
reli-
ably, in the interpreted world."'^^
We
have inherited a world
in
which a man's prime value
fend his homeland and provide for his family. These
honorable
roles,
He may be
successful by the
deep down,
that along the
really believes that
the garage
'^^
Duino
still
p.
norms of
way he
own
soul's calling.
the world, but he
has lost his soul.
No
in the
sun
is
27.
100
the
be
He
sane
knows,
man
having an attractive wife, a powerful car
and a vacation
Elegies,
may
but they are roles at best and not the whole man.
does not have permission to seek and treasure his
day
de-
is to
sum and worth
of his
to-
in
life.
Healing the Souls of Men
But most
serve such superficial values because they
still
They
other.
101
know no
are then slaves to their work, servants of seductive but
evanescent values, and generally adrift in the world our fathers served and that ground them up.
Women have to
engage
narrow range of womanhood
rightly challenged the
endorsed by the culture they received. in a radical
images and voices
economic burden,
review of their lives and their relationship to the
that
would them
And
Men
direct them.
for example, but they
the conditions that enable
and with purpose.
men
equally necessary for
It is
to pull the
carry a large
still
must increasingly
fight for
money wagon with
dignity
they must increasingly be willing to risk
all to
save what remains of their soul. I
sometimes imagine an executive
Center in
New
York
—
do and people
chester, things to
at the
top of the World Trade
lord of his domain, a wife and kids in Westto see.
But as he watches a boat
heading out the Hudson, under the curving lines of the Verrazano
Narrows Bridge, filled the
He
his spirits sink.
has achieved
expectations of his culture, but he
As Joseph Campbell
expressed
For
he sought,
knows he
it
ful-
man.
a lost
is
one can spend one's whole
it,
climbing the ladder, only to realize that
wrong
all
life
had been placed against the
wall.'^'^
men
to
begin the process of healing they must
first risk
being
honest with themselves, allowing the feelings they think they can't afford.
They must admit they
are not
happy
have achieved. They must admit they do not
what they must do
The
emotional cat
first
of what they
know who
they are or
save themselves. They must overcome the fear
such thinking, the fear that they will have
that blocks lives if the
to
in spite
is let
to
change
their
out of the bag.
step toward healing
is
perhaps the hardest.
Men must
stop lying to themselves, and by extension each other, and they must
permit their unhappiness to become conscious. They must admit
perhaps for
from
all
this point
that,
the best intentions, their lives are wrong, and that
on
it is
^^ This Business of the
their responsibility to change.
Gods
.
.
.
,
p.
19.
102 2)
Healing the Souls of Men
Men 's
lives are
All lives are to
governed by fear.
some
men
extent governed by fear, but
are deeply
Women have the enormous cultural advantage of emotional honesty. Men are afraid of the power of the mother complex and so seek to please women or dominate them. Men are afraid of other men because they are cast into competiinvested in keeping
it
tive roles; the other
man
Men are afraid
at
arm's length.
perceived as an enemy, not a brother.
is
because they
know
and ultimately unknowable. They ship they set
upon
Women know
this also,
selves and to other lated,
the world
is
large
is
indeed.
fragile
of course, but they can admit
women;
and the
feel like children within
and crashing sea
the dark
and dangerous
it
to
them-
their lives are not then so lonely, so iso-
so fraught with self-blame.
Men
have the crazy notion
their task is
that they
ought not to be
afraid, that
to conquer nature and themselves. Surely,
men have
made great leaps into the darkness and returned with marvelous maps of Terra Incognita, but, withal, each man feels shamed by the fear that he is not a real man. His shame manifests as overcompensation when he shows off or bullies others,
done incredible
things,
or in silent avoidance of the real task to which
Again, the healing of a
man
life
begins the day he can begin to be
honest with himself, the day he can acknowledge is
driven by fear,
when he can
has called him.
beat back the
how much
shame
his life
that then threat-
ens to engulf him. Only then can he recover that center which has
been obscured by the great gray fear 3) The power of the feminine
is
that haunts his soul.
immense
in the
psychic economy of
men.
The
greatest psychological influence in a
circumstances,
is
his mother.
presence, of which he
is
man's
life,
under normal
Because of the enormity of this psychic
always more or
less unconscious,
men
de-
velop a distorted relationship to the feminine in four major ways.
women; that is, they project the immensity of their mother complex onto women. Crudely expressed, "You have breasts, you must be a woman. My First,
they grant too
much
psychological power to
Healing the Souls of Men
mother was
woman, you must be
a
woman's power,
mother complex, they is
own
fall
by
the issues generated
into a projective relationship
most fundamental
the
between the sexes: Secondly,
fearful of a
will seek to please or control or avoid confronta-
tion. Unable to recognize and
power. This
So men,
like her."
103
their
based on
behind the so-called war
truth
fear replaces eros with power.
men are
of their feminine side. They associate
terrified
their feeling life, their instincts, their capacity for tenderness
nurturance, with the culturally defined nature of
woman and
and
distance
own may be
themselves accordingly. This also distances them from their
anima and occasions misleading to
profound
a
speak of a
tually a necessary part
of what
risk this part of themselves, but
world and
to the
to their
Thirdly, because
propped-up gender selves that don't
men
self-alienation. In fact,
man's "feminine
own
it
means as
life
ac-
in their nature to relate
is
it
is
Men seldom
in
women's.
are so insecure in their sexual identity
roles, they fear
fall
be a man.
much
as
it is
inner
anima
side," for the to
it
and
and deny those parts of them-
When
within narrow collective limits.
they see
those aspects being lived out by others, they reject them violently.
Homophobia live
is
a
prime example. Gay
homosexuality
is
not a choice at
all,
tion that has existed in roughly the tory.
This genetic spin of the dice
oppression.
go
Gay men have
the
macho
closet
same
and name the
incarnate their unlived hfe.
rather our fear that
Fourthly,
it
seems
that
but a biologically based orienta-
is
who
supplant love with fear and
heart,
real
his-
engineered by that same god
same
into battle as their heterosexual brothers.
of the
who
surely have the right to
same percentages throughout
worshipped by the fundamentalists
to
men
according to their sexual orientation. Increasingly
It is
problem
The enemy
is
same courage
soul,
—
time to
that
men
come
out
fear those
not the other guy, but
we are not what patriarchy demands.
men's experience of the power of the feminine has
evolved into an overvaluation and fear of sexuality. Nietzsche once
observed that the primary purpose of marriage was conversation.'^^
'^^
"Human, All-Too-Human,"
in
The Portable Nietzsche,
p.
59.
104
Healing the Souls of Men
The purpose of a committed one example,
is
meant
is
which marriage
grow through and with each
to
be dialectical
—
men, too often feeling deficient
other. Relation-
soulful encounters that
enlarge. One of the bridges between the sexes,
sis
to
temper and
be sure,
in discourse, place too
is,
and
it
is at least
a
profound mystery,
it is
easily
misused. The primary psychological purpose of sex for those
who spend
their lives in the cold, cruel world,
ship with their place.
Sex
is
a
own anima
may numb
transcendence.
one may
is frigid,
the
the closest
to
life
a narcotic to
Orgasm can be an
act offers a
warm
still
the
momentary
ecstatic experience; for the
moment
confines of ordinary consciousness.
It
many men ever come to a religious experience. Thus may mask a desperate search for acceptance, underis
ultimately a destruc-
game. Sex as loving, sex as conversing, sex as
suppose an equal partner. Sex as redemption
dialectic, all pre-
distorts the relationship
Satumian shadow of power.
and allows entry
to the
present, nothing
is really
Men
men
relation-
reconnect with a
neath which lurks the mother complex. This tive
and whose
batters them, then sex, like drugs or
wound. The sexual
feel outside the iron
the act of sex
is
form of emotional reassurance,
pain of the bruised soul. If
work,
4)
But
sex.
is
much empha-
on intercourse.
Whatever sex
is
but
is
not to take care of each other, to reinforce the parent-
child complexes, but to
ship
relationship, of
When
Saturn
is
fun, luminescent or transforming.
collude in a conspiracy of silence whose aim
is to
suppress
their emotional truth.
Virtually any
and suffered
man will
recall
occasions
ridicule or rejection.
Men
when he expressed himself
pay a heavy price for being
seen to be fragile and vulnerable. They are shamed by other men,
sometimes by women,
but,
most of
all,
by themselves. Those who
daily lay siege to the Castle Perilous need as
much
self-confidence as
they can muster to bolster their shaky hold on a strong self-image. in
keeping quiet about what damages them. The
word "conspiracy"
derives from Latin conspirare, "to breathe to-
So they collude gether."
Men
breathe silently together to protect their frightened
Healing the Souls of Men souls, prolonging the
wounding of all.
Again, one comes to the issue of honesty. Individual risk
speaking the
many
truth, their
An
105
personal truth, for
it
will
men must
be the truth for
speaks the right word will be heard a thousand miles
who away. For men
to stop lying, to stop participating in the conspiracy
of silence, they
must
others.
showing
risk
shame them, time 5)
all
old Chinese saying suggests that the one
will
or,
Other men may, reflexively, leap own fear, dissociate from them. But thank those who speak their truth aloud.
their pain.
out of their
come
to
to in
Because men must leave Mother^ and transcend the mother com-
wounding
plex,
is
necessary.
Having delineated the power of the mother complex, the part of a
man
that longs for nurturance
and safety above
all,
we must
also ac-
knowledge the necessary wounding of the male. Our ancestors, with their rites
of separation from childhood dependency to adult indepen-
dence, were not being gratuitously cruel in wounding their youth.
Their
wounds were symbolic, hence
freighted with archetypal
The wounds were a form of synecdoche,
ing.
mean-
a part illustrating the
whole, an introduction to the world's wounding, the experience of
which would henceforth become one's
When a teammate reminded me of the
wounds
larger worid.
to
that a torn fingernail
come, he was being helpful
When
it
was
be ready for the necessary line
daily experience.
third
wounding of a youth was
But even more,
it
was
a
way
assume
else,
its
parent or
tribe,
power sweep
own
to
at the
comforts. So the
of helping him to face the coming pain
the burden of his journey,
its
warm
and achieve
So men must be wounded
hearth.
pain and solitude.
could spare him that journey
his capacity to fight for
for a
a symbolic rite d'entr^e to the worid.
of life and sacrifice his infantile longing for a to
the least
me
and short yardage, the psyche had
collision, to stop the
of scrimmage, not be preoccupied with
tribal
was
in preparing
lest
He was
No one
they also steal
his full potential.
to truly enter the worid, to
have con-
sciousness quickened, to undertake the heroic task of leaving the
mother and becoming masters of
their
own
destiny.
We
are
all like
Healing the Souls of Men
106
We
Philoctetes.
and
feel rejected
hurt;
we would
like to retire to
our
separate caves and hang out, full of self-pity. But for each of us the
anew with
hero task summons: each of us, each day, must struggle
demons of
the grinning
fear
and lethargy
from the
that confront us
foot of the bed, eager to eat another piece of our soul. 1
never cease to marvel
capacity of
at the
men
(and
women
too, of
home and venture into the unknown. I never cease to who first crossed the mountains, who wine-dark seas, who went down into Hades' kingdom
course) to leave
admire the courage of those navigated the
and wrote "Sonnets
to
Orpheus" or the
Fifth
Symphony. And
I
ask
"Why should we honor those that die upon the man may show as reckless a courage in entering into
myself, as Yeats did, field
of battle, a
the abyss of himself."79
Beyond wounding to live
unknown, without
way and life
lies
new
a
without the wounds
that
6)
lives are violent
The wounds men
we pay
the
is
he might become the hero
which we
in his
own
that
would
return,
would
for greater consciousness,
wounding of
the protagonist so
hfe.
because their souls have been violated.
suffer today are not symbolic; that
not transform. Because our culture lacks meaningful
images
into the
and wonderful adventures along the
the strange
be worth anything? The price
Men's
psychopomp, lead us
the blood-burnished trophies with
and worlds worth winning,
we were
level of consciousness. If
that, like a
and
activate
rites
is,
they do
of passage,
direct the energies of the soul,
most
modem men feel
weighted, even crushed, by their roles and the ex-
pectations, outer
and
inner,
upon them. Nothing
helpful
is
touched
and moved. Whatever wounds can also destroy. Violate a man's soul and some part of him becomes killers
have
all
trated postal
Mass-murderers and
The
serial
frus-
employee or bank clerk who goes berserk has become
commonplace on iceberg. Soul
violent.
suffered violent verbal and physical abuse.
the six o'clock news. But that
murders occur
^^ Richard Ellman, Yeats: The
all
is
only the
the time in the lives of men.
Man and
the Masks,
p.
6.
tip
of the
Healing the Souls of Men
Not only job, to
are
men
called
upon
hang from the bridge and scrape the paint
pounding pressures,
to stay cool
pected to suffer such
wounding
they are asked, as their soul to serve
shamed
women
dirty, difficult
push back
flecks, to
and psychological barriers of nature,
the physical
are
do the dangerous,
to
to
107
hold up under
and collected, they are also ex-
in silence
and
solitude.
Most of
all,
too have often been asked, to sacrifice
some economic,
political or cultural
norm. They
they resist the deformation of their nature, shunned
if
they protest, and sometimes even martyred
vision
their
if
if
too
strongly challenges the status quo.
Men need to acknowledge their anger, to the level
anger that has accumulated
of rage. Where does that rage go? For
may
as depression, a general heaviness they long. For others
projected in the
For
many
it
manifests
it
whole
life
somatizes in sundry provinces of the body or
paranoid game of
the rage
some
carry their
is
us and them, winners and
acted out against
women
is
losers.
and children or other
men, the deep knowledge of their soul's suffering projected onto any convenient object.
There has been enough brutahty
men must ing.
We
world
cannot help but suffer passively
we
cannot help but be victims while
we become that has
in the
to last forever.
Now
channel their anger to fuel the changes imperative to heal-
conscious
we
grown through
when we
are children;
are responsible for our lives.
the years
is
we
remain unconscious. But once
now
The anger
energy enough for change,
for rebellion, for the necessary struggle to save the soul. 7)
Each man
carries a deep longing for his father
and for
his tribal
fathers.
As
great as
is
the inner pressure, the
the realm of the Mother, so
must
deep pull back and down
a corresponding force
bridge the psyche over the great-in-between. This
embodied
in tribal rites
was
the
of passage out of childhood. The
into
emerge
to
wisdom
rites
were
extensive, psychologically powerful, and prolonged to the degree that the
mother complex had power over the nascent ego.
To leave the comforts of home, the mother world, one must have
108
Healing the Souls of Men
some
place to go. Admittedly, the rites of passage of traditional cul-
tures
were
mogenous
youth into a simpler society, a more ho-
to initiate the
culture than ours.
As well,
their interest lay not in the indi-
viduation of the person but in the integration of that unformed person into the collective definition of tribal masculinity.
such psychically charged images of
identity, take
Still,
away
away wisdom
take
the
of the elders, take away the community of men, and one has the
modem
world.
Since nature abhors a vacuum, so tiated,
fill
we leam
men
the great-in-between with drugs, work, their partners. If
relationship
by
relating to the otherness of others,
firm our identity by modeling like to their identity via the culture
uninitiated males as their
knowledge the is
reality
we
con-
today cannot claim
because they are obliged to find other
models or succumb
of what
lies
to the
may
within.
empty values of
begin,
Among
men must
a
ac-
those confusing
a deep grief for the loss of the personal father as compan-
model and support, and
ion,
Men
like.
materialist society. Again, before healing
emotions
today, childlike and unini-
a
deep hunger for the fathers as a source
of wisdom, solace and inspiration. It
was
the office of the tribal elders to pass
ancestors, to inform the youth of the gods
who
on the wisdom of the
whom
he was to serve and
Men today have no rooting in any tribal history reahty. Men who have no grounding connection with
stood by him.
or transcendent their
gods are
well.
Such men are
in
grave peril and they will bring danger to others as
They
lost.
feel
abandoned by history and the
wise old men. They long for modeling and for the great teachings.
They
suffer their exile in silence or act out their grief disguised as
rage.
Such men are
legion.
8) If men are to heal, they
must activate within what they did not
re-
ceive from without.
Because men cannot turn are
few
if
any wise men,
let
to tribal elders,
alone initiated ones, they suffer a deep
sickness of the soul. Since the psychic
of reference, are missing,
and have learned there
loci, the
men must leam
mythological points
to heal themselves.
Occa-
Healing the Souls of Men sionally,
such healing
large, they
must go
In his novel
the
shared with their fellows, but, by and
alone.
it
Demian, Herman Hesse,
modem
healing of the
may be
who
soul, suffering exile
certainly addressed the
and persecution
thrice
and
Nobel Prize once as recompense, observed, "In a world of wan-
derers,
when
paths intersect, the world feels like
for awhile. "^^
home
But the experience of community, of primal connection, "awhile"; then one
is
/
here. Again, the formative is
only for
Father Task
review of the morphology of the mother complex
che of the child
is
back on the journey alone.
The Mother Complex
A
109
power of
the personal
is
warranted
mother
in the psy-
enormous. The child's experience of the mother
is
intemalized as a complex, an emotionally charged cluster of energy
beyond
the control of the ego.
As
world of nature and the body, and
the
mother
is
the bridge to the
to relationship, so the
boy's expe-
rience of her ripples through his archetypal depths. In other words, a
the his
life
man's relationship
force that courses through
him
to himself, to others is
and
to
profoundly channeled by
primary experience of mother. To the extent that she
is
unable to
meet his needs, and imposes her personal complexes on him, so he will suffer the
wounds of abandonment and overwhehnent. From
former he learns
to distrust his
own worth and
the
the reliability of the
world. Because of the latter he feels powerless to defend his fragile frontier ality
and so evolves a generally compliant, co-dependent person-
or a fearful, overcompensated, power-dominated one. In either
case, he
erful that tion,
not himself, but lives in reaction to an experience so
is
subordinates his natural truth.
it
pow-
This compromise forma-
repeated throughout childhood, produces a false personality and
furthers the projection of that first relationship onto later, adult rela-
tionships.
Thus he
^^ Demian,
p.
lives a false self.^^
104.
^^ See The Middle Passage, chapter
between the
false,
1,
for further discussion
acquired personality and the natural
self.
of the
collision
Healing the Souls of Men
110
Since the child
is
completely dependent, any threat to his needi-
men
ness occasions great fear. All
them
carry within
the replicated
memory of this vulnerability. They suffer enormous fear that their needs may not be met, fear that their neediness will prolong their dependency. Out of this troubled condition, which remains with men however
bred anger and sorrow.
old, are
needs are not met and they grieve the are battered
and buffeted by the
Men As
loss.
are angry that their
they
grow older and
roles of adulthood, these
emotions
tend to slip into the unconscious. But such energies do not go away; they go somewhere, always. Their anger
may be
emotion
as a life-long depression, or somatized in
may
body. They
more
by beating
women
that attacks the
and bashing gays,
or,
by corporate head-butting. Their anima, which they
abstractly,
suspect because
act out
deeply introverted
it
reminds them of the mother world,
is
kept at bay.
She, naturally, expresses herself in irritability and general bitchiness.
The man's sorrow manifests he
slips fuzzily into the
beloved
who will
Beneath
all
as melancholy, as addictions
mother, or through a vague longing for a
enter his
life
and heal him.
of these dynamics
that they will not
be taken care
ing terror of dependency.
and without, as a
whereby
on the one hand, men's
are,
of,
fear
and, on the other, an overwhelm-
Thus men
fight the feminine, both within
unconscious fear of their
result of their largely
own
incestuous longing for peace.
Since
all
men
carry the mother
imago deep
within, charged vari-
ously from one to the other, so the result of their restricted consciousness
is
to
the masculine. cal thinking
produce a highly defended and narrow definition of
Men
evolved the patriarchy, with
and social structures, and
nine, as a defense against the
its
its
rules, hierarchi-
subjugation of the femi-
mother complex. Fathers and sons can
barely talk to each other, lest they be obliged to share the shameful secret that the fathers are castrated
even as Cronus-Saturn as
the
problem
it
did.
seeks
and seek
The compensation, to
defend
to castrate their sons,
then,
against.
is
just as kiUing
Both the
fearful
suppression of the complex and the patriarchal reaction alienate
from themselves.
men
Healing the Souls of Men
Men
everywhere are fated
some emotional analogue,
to face their partners, institutions or
carrying the dynamics of childhood as a
contemporaneous experience. The past father live within, every
111
moment
the collective experience of
—
them
not truly past. Mother and
is
not only the personal parents, but
as well. Thus, feeling
all
the old
need, the old fear, the old longing, the old anger, albeit uncon-
men
sciously,
project these
power
Other, then, has the
dynamics onto the current Other. That the primal parent once had,
will variously try to control or placate, or
why
which men
even avoid altogether.
many men seem angry and controlling at home and in the workplace. It also explains why there seems to be an increase in those who may be described as passive-aggressive. They feel powerless, but they are angry and will find a way to sabotage or This explains
so
subvert the Other. Their powerlessness are so
how
is all
the
more acute
few positive models of masculine empowerment
to tackle
such large needs and fears oneself, thereby
as there
show
that
lifting their
projections off others.
Men
can never be in
uinely different,
complex
if
reality, that is, deal
they cannot discern the effect of their mother
rippling within. Yes,
it
takes a great deal of courage, insight
make such material conmen to work with the mother
and patience, as well as steady work, scious.
It
is
especially difficult for
complex, since uncovering to jeopardize the frail tity.
But, until
compensated
with the Other as gen-
men
its
to
power and influence
in their lives tends
hold they already have on their masculine iden-
can take the
risk,
they will remain stuck in a
and
identity that only furthers their inner division
their
estrangement from others.
What
Is
Before
we can reahstically
Healing, and
Who
the Healer?
address the healing of men,
examine what healing means and where
may be
in
we must
first
our time healing agencies
found.
Franz Kafka wrote a prophetic story tury titled
"The Country Doctor."
A
at the
beginning of
physician
is
middle of a raging snow storm to attend a patient.
this
cen-
called out in the
When
he arrives
112
Healing the Souls of Men
the villagers are all
crowded around
a
young man. The youth says
the physician,
"Save me, save me." The doctor examines
and proclaims
that
The doctor looks again and sees with multiple rose-red layers. ger wriggle to the
That
the youth cries.
a gaping sore in the patient's side,
Worms
as thick
and as long as
his fin-
The
villagers are incensed
and engage
vestments and throw him out into the wild. Strugghng to
way back through is
same me,"
or
doctor of his powers. They chant, circle him,
in a ritual divesting the
find his
wound
After a further examination, the doctor ex-
light.
plains that he cannot save him.
strip off his
his patient
he can find nothing wrong; no apparent
diseased condition. Again, "Save me,
to
what people are
the darkness, the physician thinks:
my
like in
district.
Always expecting
the
impossible from the doctor. They have lost their ancient beliefs; the
parson
home and
sits at
but the doctor
is
unravels his vestments, one after another;
supposed
geon's hand. Well, as
it
to
be omnipotent with
his merciful sur-
pleases them.^^
Kafka's story has metaphoric and prophetic meaning. The power of the clergy has waned, supplanted by a priest, in a
science, cannot save either.
velous powers,
is
religion,
new
medical
with
all its
mar-
powerless to heal such a wound. Thus the physi-
Kafka warns us against placing our eth century has placed are to the soul,
The physician
new
visible. Science,
becomes another dismantled servant of
wounds
superstition and a
Only upon closer examination does the
symbolic rose-red wound become
cian
new
white coat instead of black. But the
it
—
a discredited divinity.
faith precisely
and only
that
which reaches
a servant of Physis (nature).
is
where the twenti-
in the external, quantifiable world. it
can
Our
heal.
The physician does
we get medicus, "healer," mederi, When the body is broken the physi-
not heal; nature heals. (From Latin "to heal" and docere, "to lead.")
cian
may promote
wounds
conditions that facilitate healing, but cannot heal
to the soul.
Decades ago D. H. Lawrence realized
this:
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections. And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly,
^^The Penal
Colony, p.
141.
Healing the Souls of Men that
am
I
I
am
ill.
because of wounds
ill
113
deep
to the soul, to the
emotional self
and the wounds
to the soul take a long,
long time,
only time can help
and patience, and a certain
difficult
repentance,
long, difficult repentance, realisation of life's mistake,
and the freeing of oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify .^^
Our society has long
treated
men
as machines, as bodies expend-
Men
able in the
name of progress
and soul's
delight, taught to think of themselves as
or profit.
have overruled
Such an estrangement wounds very deeply; and
is
shadow
is
a dubious undertaking.
lives, the
The wounding
is
only
men
All
suffer
in
and
sanctified,
and men unwit-
own crucifixion.
from neurosis. The word
itself
suggests a mechan-
and, indeed, derives from the Enlightenment's effort to
simply signifies the deep
split
in fact neurosis
between socialization and
tween collective culture and individual psyche. fit
alone a whole
town, and shame on the defector.
models of the cosmos and models of men. But
create
not
let
But the beat goes on, the Satumian
institutionalized
tingly collude in their
ical failure
game
"mechanisms."
has gone on so long
it
so taken for granted that healing individuals,
gender,
their pain
When
soul, be-
outer roles do
the shape of one's soul, a terrible one-sidedness occurs.
the suffering of this imbalance that impels
and on each
The
men
to
It is
war on themselves
other.
role of the therapist is to attend this split
and
to
observe what
images emerge, be they cognitive, of the body or of dream-life. Such
images are symptoms. The German word for symptom, Zustandsbildy
means
"picture of a condition," representing the psyche's effort
to heal itself
through a symbolic bridging.
the unconscious depths
^^ "Healing,"
in
Symptoms
partake of both
and the conscious world. They bridge as
Robert Bly, James Hillman and Michael Meade, eds., The the Heart, p. 113.
Rag and Bone Shop of
114
Healing the Souls of Men
metaphoric agents. The word "metaphor"
is
from Greek meta, "over,
across," ¥ pherein, "to carry." Thus psychotherapy
is
etymologically
akin to waiting upon or attending the expression of soul. Jungian analysis
is
not reductive but synthetic; the
Greek analusis, does not mean Images
that
word
from the
"analysis,"
to rationalize but "to
undo, loosen."
undo or loosen one's conscious perception of oneself are by which the psyche heals
the basis for the process
itself.
In Jung's
words:
The mediatory product
[e.g.,
image or symbol]
material for a process not of dissolution but
which comes
and antithesis both play
thesis
a
new
.
forms the raw
their part. In this
way
channel.
Healing the soul
is
gaged by images
life
can flow on with
a process not unlike that of creativity itself, so
perhaps the work of the
artist is a
that float
testified that they
upward
might
start
useful paradigm.
The
into consciousness.
artist is
Many
en-
artists
out with an idea for a work, but
then something else takes over. Their best work, they claim,
when
be-
it
and forcing the energy of the opposites into a com-
The standstill is overcome and renewed power towards new goals.^^
have
.
content that governs the whole attitude, putting an end
to the division
mon
.
of construction, in
comes
they are able to surrender their ego and their talent to express
those images in paint, sound or words. Thus, as Jung noted, the creative process involves the "activation of archetypal
images and the
shaping of those images into the finished work."^^
Depth psychotherapy
activates nascent images in the psyche
and
then supports a dialogue with them. Jung described this process as the transcendent function, barriers
by which the Self seeks
to transcend the
between consciousness and the unconscious.
words, the psyche seeks to heal
itself.
In
other
This approach to healing
is
therefore homeopathic rather than allopathic: like cures like. Healing
comes from resonance,
the re-sounding or re-cognition of likeness.
Men's healing comes when
the proper images are
fathers or the tribal elders, of
^"^
when
"Definitions," Psychological Types,
85 Ibid.
modeled by
their
they themselves can activate
CW
6,
par. 827.
Healing the Souls of Men
comes through
those images. Personal healing, soul healing,
115 the
evocation of symbolic images or acts that resonate and mediate the split.
Shamanic healing
in traditional cultures frequently
recitation of creation myths, foundation legends
employed
of the
tribe,
the
for in
those narratives lay images that evoked the transcendent function in
When
the psyche of the suffering patient.
such images were deeply
accepted and consciously integrated, healing was possible. Today analysts
assist
process by
this
collaborating with the images. it is
due
to a transpersonal,
Then, as Rilke reminds
us,
second large and timeless
by
attendance,
fidelity
and by
But always, whenever healing occurs,
mysterious agency, experienced as grace.
we "know
that there is
room
in us / for a
life."^*^
Seven Steps to Healing In this last section
will
I
None of them
possibility of healing.
may promote a move for men collectively. Let
me repeat
I
ready aspects of the
change the
movement seem strength
its
occur only
is
to
efforts will achieve
much. Al-
faddish and pass6, perhaps un-
fading.
when enough
work of self-healing,
both for individuals and
respect those participating in the current
do not expect such
but clearly
will
I
that support the
original, but together they
is
in the right direction,
that while
men's movement,
fairly so,
advance seven concepts
I
believe that collective
individual
whatever level
we
men
change.
can bring
it,
From
the focus
of our culture will change. This
sudden
may be a
forlorn hope, but
it
is
more
shifts in collective consciousness.
to feel the pressure of traditional
Satumian
called to sacrifice their bodies
and
They
will
still
be expected
triarchal values
selves.
And
expect
than to expect
men
will continue
They will still be for economic ends.
dictates.
their souls
to collude in the silence that supports pa-
and estranges them from other men and from them-
they will
^ Selected Poems
I
realistic
still
carry their grief and rage to early graves.
of Rainer Maria Rilke,
p.
19.
— Healing the Souls of Men
116
But
my
hope, at
least, is that
men
individual
come
the wise elders
we all
become conscious, some will even be-
will
saving themselves and helping others. Perhaps need.
Here, then, are seven steps toward self-healing, followed by a discussion of each. 1)
Re-member the
loss of the fathers.
2) Tell the secrets. 3)
Seek mentors and mentor
4) Risk loving 5) Heal 6)
others.
men.
thyself.
Recover your soul's journey.
7) Join the revolution.
1)
Re-member the If
we
loss of the fathers.
are to learn our nature
from those of our own gender, then
our relationship to both our personal and
tribal fathers is critical.
But
ever since the Industrial Revolution and the vast urban migration
which
is
to say, for the past
two centuries
roots: their relationship to their
and
homes,
to their souls. In return for greater
—most men have
to the
work of
lost their
their hands,
economic security they have
adapted their energies to roles that serve profit but deform the soul.
Such men have suffered grievous wounds and, unknowing, have wounded
Greek drama, the wounds
who make such an lineage and
Like the tragic curse
their sons.
ripple through the generations.
historic
wounding conscious, who see
re-member themselves,
that
scend the Satumian weight of history. rendered the experience of living with a
Olds
in her appropriately titled
is,
heal the
poem "Satum."^'^
filling his
mouth, and no one knew
my
was
87 In Bly et
al.,
eating his children.
Rag and Bone Shop of
split,
and in a
Only men it
in their
may
tran-
Few have more dramatically wounded father than Sharon
He lay on the couch night after night, mouth open, the darkness of the room father
in their pain
the Heart, p.
128.
Healing the Souls of Men
She goes on
to describe
how
117
her father eats each child in turn. She
beheves that in the nerves
of his gums and
bowels he knew what he was doing and he could not stop himself.
This
is
what he wanted,
to take that life into his
and show what a
man
what a man's
was.
Other sons saw as
I
saw my
life
—show
son
his
their fathers suffering the Saturnian burden, just
father leave the assembly line to shovel coal
ends into the bins of others.
on the
mouth
could do
on week-
took for granted
—food
shoes to wear. In "Those Winter Sun-
table, the rent paid,
days," Robert
How much we
Hayden remembers
his father's struggles
and
his
own
innocence and indifference. With pain in his heart he recalls Speaking indifferently
to him,
who had driven out the cold
my good shoes as well. know, what did I know
and polished
What
did
I
of love's austere and lonely offices ?^^
These were our
fathers,
more wounded than we can imagine, with
no alternatives or emotional permission speakably lonely. For such Grief
is
honest.
It
it is
88
sweetest
Ibid.,
p.
is
a blunting of the
it
may
cleansing and healing in
involuntarily pull us under, life's
142.
grieve.
or was never
to carry that
open remembering, and while
moment,
lost,
there.
Men
life force;
how-
press the father loss into the unconscious, the
psyche knows and condemns us is
was
most often as a depression they may
not even be aware of. Depression
we may
be themselves, and un-
men we must unashamedly
values what
carry this heaviness in any case,
ever deeply
to
its
weighted
feeling. Grief
not feel very good at the honesty. Depression
however functional our outer
moments may be
tinged with this heaviness.
life.
may Even
Healing the Souls of Men
118
One man, a stock driven him. He could on
broker, drove himself as his father had once
not relax.
worked himself
ther's approval, he
ther
was dead,
still.
Even when he exceeded
let
Weekends were
the time to catch
work. His father had only valued work,
his
up. After
to the edge.
win
up
his fa-
Even though
the fa-
imago remained charged and drove him
the father
his father's financial status
two years of therapy he managed
weekends and,
so, to
to stop
he could not
working on
father's grave for the first time.
finally, visit his
There he wept for the tenderness and acceptance that he would never receive from his father. His tears, his grief, allowed
him
to
begin
moving forward in his own life, a life he scarcely knew at all, having been defmed previously by the Satumian shadow of the wounded and wounding
pushed underground produces depression, so does anger
If grief
denied.
father.
Anger is
wounding. Once
a legitimate and reflexive reaction of the organism to I
had an analysand
who
casually
announced he had
involved his sons in incestuous acts. They had collaborated, he averred.
felt
I
my
anger
and for father's touch
ther's love
their powerlessness, their naivete
ing bodily sex for love. adult sons
hope was
who were looking for faand found one who would betray
rise for the
I
boys
and unconscious
to suffer their grief
might heal somewhat, even
that they
feel
gnaws
at
them,
and if
mistak-
this to his
now
their anger.
The
asked him to speak about
and be willing
The anger many sons
literalism,
he would not.
in their ulcers, their
mi-
graines, their drivenness to achieve the affirmation every child de-
serves.
Men
wounder,
if
need
angry
to get
they are ever to heal.
at
the
wounds, as well as the
One may
But anger,
well ask what good that
any powerful emotion,
does so long after the
fact.
does not go away.
always goes somewhere. The wounded son
will
It
like
wound his son if he does not cleanse anger may clear the air and produce
cle. If
still-living father,
wedge only front.
then
it
deeper, then
it
must be
himself and break the cya fresh beginning with the
risked. If anger will drive the
must be a conscious decision not
But each son must confront
stays the prisoner of Saturn.
to
con-
that anger within himself or
he
Healing the Souls of Men It is
imperative that
They
scious.
men
render what
certainly cannot
is
change the
inside of
119
them more con-
past, nor, often,
can they
change the outer father-son relationship. But what they do not know operates silently within them nonetheless. Given Jung's profound
observation that the greatest burden the child must bear life
is
the unlived
of the parent, so each father's son must examine, without the
motive
to judge,
where
his father's
wounds were passed on
to him.
Either he finds himself repeating his father's patterns or living in re-
action to
Each
them
—
in
father's
both cases he
Saturn's prisoner.
son must ask himself, "What were
wounds? What were were
is
his hopes, his
his sacrifices, if any, for
dreams? Did he
emotional permission to live his
me and
live out his
life?
Did he
my
father's
others?
What
dreams? Did he have
live his life or the Satur-
What did he receive from his father and culture that hinWhat would I have liked to know from him about his life, his history? What would I have liked to know from him about being a man? Was he able to answer such questions, however tentatively, for himself? Did he ever ask them? What was my father's unlived life, and am I living it out, somehow, for him?" nian tapes?
dered his journey?
These are the mostly unspoken questions between generations.
If
they are not voiced consciously, their implicit answers have been lived out unconsciously, often in
wounding ways. When we ask
father, we are more likely to He becomes more a man like us, a same ordeal. Then we are more likely,
such questions, even of a deceased avoid idealizing or devaluing him. brother
even
who
in the
has suffered the
case of severe wounding, to operate out of compassion.
we are caught up in hate we stay bound to that which wounds us. When we understand our fathers better, from the vantage point of adults, we are better able to begin the process of fathering ourselves. If
2) Tell the secrets.
Those nial the
one
in the healing professions
wound
festers. Or, as the
resists, persists.
to the truth. Rarely
Men's
know
that
wherever there
twelve-step programs put
lives are
it,
is
de-
what
based on denial and resistance
does one hear the unvarnished
truth, as in the
120
Healing the Souls of Men
confession of Pablo Neruda:
so happens
"It
man."^^ Note that he does not say he role as a
man
I
am
sick of being a
sick of being himself;
is
that sickens him. This is the deepest truth
Thoreau who
to find his soul again, to
there are a million into collective
slips
engage
women
men, and
away
lives
woods
to the
who
loo,
tion of soul is recorded
men's
lives
Neruda
tells
life,
every day slide back lead, in
Thoreau 's
of quiet desperation.
Since the psyche knows more than consciousness,
The most notable of
for awhile
of his
in a radical revisioning
anonymity and soullessness. They
memorable phrase,
his
carry,
deformed through being defined by outside
that their souls are
forces. For every
it is
men
this
deforma-
and occasions a concatenation of responses.
reactions
even though they
the tinge of sorrow that haunts
is
may
cover themselves well. Again,
the truth, inescapably:
There are expanses,
sunken factories, pieces of timber which I alone know, because
and
I
I
am sad,
know
The other
and because
the earth, and
tell-tale
ferentiated, turns
sign
is
a real
I
travel,
am sad.^
their rage
on themselves and
which, misdirected and undifothers.
And
underneath
all this
No man
feels human is the terrible fear. man. His macho behavior belies his terror. W.H. Auden
"fury and mire of
he
is
I
veins"^i
also told the truth: Patriots? Little boys,
obsessed by Bigness,
Big Pricks, Big Money, Big Bangs.^^
When men sense soul's intention tion.
that they are frauds, that
is,
Estranged progressively from their inner
89 "Walking Around,"
^
in
ibid,
p.
"Melancholy Inside Families," 9^ W.B. Yeats, "Byzantium," in 243. 92 "Marginalia,"
caught between their
and external demands, they are forced
in
life,
to dissimula-
their
anima, they
105. in
ibid,
The
p.
104.
Collected
Poems of
The Collected Poems of W.H. Auden,
p.
W.B.
592.
Yeats,
p.
Healing the Souls of Men
women
expect
much from
to carry the burden. Sex, in particular, is
importance, for through their
it
feehng state and from
them and
to reconnect
battering. This
to reassure
makes them
As humans must
men seek to overcome their own body. They
upon
failures as
men,
that
is
their isolation
ask the Other
dawn
whom they depend,
replaced by the
is
These are the central secrets of men
are torn
the
given too
brings
new
as vulnerable and dependent as before.
hate those
animosity grow, and eros
them before
121
as persons
—
that they feel
who happen
between fear and rage, and
so tension and
shadow of power.
to
themselves
be men, that they
that they are emotionally
depen-
dent but resentful of the object of that dependence. Again, the only
way
out
is
consciously to acknowledge these insufferable truths.
They must begin with themselves and then share others
—not with
a
woman
also in fearful defendedness,
proportion to his to
acknowledge
but he
fear,
may scorn the truth-teller, his scorn in may also step from behind the ramparts
his brother.
Our mythology
is full
of heroic adventures
ogres fought, dragons defeated
—but
man
truths.
to
that truth with
but with another man. That man, caught
speak his emotional
it
—mountains climbed,
takes even
more courage
The hero quest today
is
for a
not
through the physical world but through the badlands of the soul. The evil
men must engage
is
not the barbarian at the gates but the dark-
ness within, the fear from which only boldness
Jung described The its
spirit
may
bring delivery.
this heroic task:
of evil
is
fear, negation, the
adversary
who opposes life in who in-
struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed,
fuses into the
body the poison of weakness and age through the
treacherous bite of the serpent; he
tinction in task,
bondage
the spirit of regression,
fear
is
pensation or
who
to the
because only boldness can deliver from
not taken, the meaning of
Our
is
mother and with dissolution and exthe unconscious. For the hero, fear is a challenge and a
threatens us with
the task
—
life is
somehow
failing the task
shamed complicity.
^^ Symbols of Transformation,
par.
fear.
And
if
the risk
is
violated.^^
we
bluster into
macho com-
Telling the truth of our soul to our-
551.
Healing the Souls of Men
122
selves telling test
the
is it
Living that truth
first task.
Such
to others is the third.
of our
we
And
the second task.
be the supreme
truth-telling will
Afterward, perhaps,
lives.
is
can stop being "sick of be-
ing a man." 3) Seek mentors
and mentor others.
As mentioned
here earlier,
years ago, the ratio of
when I began my
women
to
men who
practice about fifteen
sought therapy was per-
haps nine to one. Today, without seeking to change ratio is
about six to four
things: that
men
in favor
deep trouble,
are in
my
of men. This shift
climate of the collective has shifted
that
clientele, the
tells
many know
it,
me
several
and
that the
somewhat and therapy
is
there-
fore less risky. In fact
who
it is
men
of greater emotional strength and core honesty
seek therapy. The others are too
dragged into therapy by his wife, of tissue
at his
fearful.
Some,
like the
who condescended toward
elbow and the cauterizing
the
man box
tears they implied, are in the
deepest trouble. They are at war with their partners and themselves.
men to share their lives honest and know they are not going to be
Therapy offers a unique opportunity be emotionally
privately, to
shamed, the
to share secrets
enormous
serves as a
tion into the
about the task of being a man. For awhile,
ring of isolation
rite
back on
therapy also
life is
in,
as
men
track. In time they
come
that
She
is
the fathers though this to
problem"
to realize that
wrong, that choices made unconsciously led them
have a troubled relationship
dom suspect
initia-
generally do,
labyrinthine paths of ever-greater self-estrangement.
realize they
come
many men
there," that if they can "fix the
their lives will get
down
For
male world. They often come is ''out
whole
is lifted.
of passage, a separation from the mother and
thinking their issue
their
for
in
is
They may
to the feminine, but they sel-
them. They have an enormous longing for
fundamentally unconscious.
And
they often
recognize that they have lost their gods, their connection to
nature and their
own body.
Generally, for
numb. But they
all
feel
the pain they feel, these
men
are often curiously
even more pain as they become conscious. They
Healing the Souls of Men realize they
greater
123
need the teaching of the wise elders and they long for
meaning
They also learn that they must heal cannot. Then they cry and rage, and admit
in their lives.
themselves; their partners
When these things happen, healing begins. Most men will not enter therapy of course. They
the fear.
lack the
means
and opportunity, or are too afraid of the huge emptiness they might find inside. Yet
even they may turn
from
they have learned, or learn, visited the other side
Collectively,
and can
men have a
fully separated.
men and
to other
A
others.
mentor
us something of what
tell
As
lot to share.
pass on what
one
is
who
individuals they are fright-
The men's groups dotting
the continent are truly
men
wonderful opportunities for sharing and mentoring, but most will never
go near them and
will suffer their isolation forever.
Unfortunately, few mentors are to be found.
had an
initiatory
has
it's like there.
How many men have
experience and integrated that experience into a
working Weltanschauung? Boys
still
man
need that older
to teach
and model the knowledge of the outer world. But who, as Nietzsche asked, will teach the teachers?
Who
no collective
truth,
once again,
sage,
no mythically grounded body of experience
is
that in
their journey. So, they als, like
our time there
must do
the bodhisattvas of
it
mentors? The
will initiate the is
as individuals.
rite
to assist
And
of pas-
men
in
such individu-
Buddhism, can reach back and, out of
simple compassion, bring their fellows along. 4) Risk loving men.
Recently an analysand observed it
was
for him to risk loving men.
how As a
how
necessary but
difficult
particularly insightful,
courageous man, he acknowledged that the problem was his
homophobia,
literally, fear
of men.
own gender after all? Yes, we have all grown
Why
should he be afraid of
and
own men,
his
been conditioned the other fellow
game. But a social
to
suspicious of each other, for
be competitive.
We
we have
are ever wary, fearful that
might get the upper hand, the old patriarchal power
in considering this
wounding and
dilemma we have
find the source of
to take
it
homophobia
deeper than
truly within.
Healing the Souls of Men
124
men have commonly narrowed
Just as
their relationship to
through the fragile bridge of sexuahty, so other lest they sexualize that relationship.
mophobic,
for they
have even more
to fear
Physical camaraderie
weep
Men may share even their blood
in
Thus,
their fellows. role.
permissible on the playing
is
hug, slap and hold each other, even
room.
from
hand of fear plays a determining
again, the silent
women
men are afraid to love each Even gay men may be ho-
field.
Men may
together, in the locker
combat. Recently a female
analysand went white- water rafting in Canada. The river was perilous
and her
leamed
life
was
in jeopardy, but
to control her boat
she fought through her
fear,
and had a wondrous bonding experience
with her male boatmate. After a few days, she said, they thought as
one and did not have
had had a very
ever have
treasure
it,
know how
to talk to
told her she
to navigate the rapids.
rare experience,
one
that
men,
if
all their lives.
There are few things more rewarding than for a shortstop, deep the hole, to turn
ond baseman
I
they
and throw the
intersect base
and
ball
in
toward second, and see the sec-
moment. This
ball at the exact
about practice than about the integration of soul. Perhaps this rare sense of oneness
is
spirit,
the
is
less
communion of
possible in part because
the outer challenge occasions a transcendence of the individual
ego
to
serve the joint purpose, but perhaps also because the occasion allows
men
to feel their
masculine natures without threat or ambiguity. In
less animate, less transcendent, settings, the old
doubt and ambiguity
insinuate themselves anew.
How
sad, that
men have
sports and warfare. friend.
How
Intimacy between
so few transcendent meetings outside of
rare, to
men
is
have an emotionally intimate male
compared
largely superficial
to that
between women. Most men would sooner die than discuss fears, their
that
impotence, their fragile hopes. They ask
emotional burden.
strained
from sharing
Fe, though
we
As mentioned
we
left
I
to carry
was con-
my feelings with a men's group leader in Santa
surely had a lot to talk about. But
Indianapolis and one near Vienna with
graph
women
in the first chapter,
their
unfinished years before.
whom I And
I
have a friend
in
can pick up the para-
as a therapist
I
have been
Healing the Souls of Men
125
some wonderful moments with men, conversations that could only occur as I grew more and more comfortable with myself, less fearful, more willing to disclose. privileged to have
Like the paradox of Jesus, that one can only love the neighbor to the degree
one can love oneself, so
men if they
and
whom we
then avoid.
When we
acknowl-
we are estranged from our brother because we fear him, we fear him because we are riddled with fear of ourselves,
that
that
then
only learn to love other
can learn to love themselves. Our self-blame and rage are
projected onto other men,
edge
men can
we have
not hatred;
it
taken the
is fear.
first
step toward love.
The most
individuals or as a group,
is
difficult part
we have
that
The opposite of love
is
of loving other men, as
to take the terrible risk
of
loving ourselves. Such self-acceptance in the face of failure and fear is
profoundly
tas
5)
difficult.
But replacing homophobia with eros and
Heal
thyself.
made
Repeatedly the point has been
missing in action.
And we know
here that the tribal elders are
their
from
that healing occurs
re-sonance, re-cognition, re-membering.
like to like,
So wounded men wound
sons and other men. The cycle of Saturnian sacrifice finds ever
new youth book,
We tainly
it
is
to grind up. If there is
any gospel, or good news,
that nonetheless healing
its
impact on
us.
And we
cer-
cannot change our personal history with the huge influence of
and dead, or
how we
internalized that history
cultural context, adapted ourselves to
of
in this
can and does occur.
cannot change our culture and
parents, living
all
cari-
begins at home.
us, then, lost
our
way along
it
in order to survive.
the road.
Longing
and our
Almost
for mentors, the
blind lead the blind. In
The Middle Passage
I
presented
many examples of how we
de-
velop a provisional personality in reaction to childhood experience,
how we
and make choices
that
and how by midlife we suffer the growing
split
set off into life
further estrange us,
with
this false self
between the acquired personality and the natural whatever stage of life, need
to traverse this
self.
All men, at
middle passage and save
Healing the Souls of Men
126
The
their lives.
not
first
knowing one
will later
make
is
passage, of course,
is
leaving
home
physically,
carrying inner baggage in accord with which one
inauthentic choices.
The
final
passage brings aging
and confrontation with mortality.
A good
man who way is dramatized in Tolstoy's 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich." The name Ivan Ilyich would translate roughly as "John Johnson," so we know we are dealing with an Everyman illustration
of the dues that must be paid by a
has not found himself along the
motif.
Ivan lives his roles.
Then he
is
stricken with a mortal illness and finds he has
inner reality to turn
of no help.
whole
his
no
His wife and friends are similarly empty and
finally concludes, as
rather than his.
men carry,
lived his
to.
one
in therapy often does, that
has been a sham, someone else's sense of what his
life
was about all
He
unconsciously, accepting socially prescribed
life
Then he has
life
to confront the greatest fear
not the fear of death but the fear that he had not truly
move from a provisional, manhood had not
His middle passage, the
life.
childhood-bound, culture-driven
life,
to authentic
occurred and he was as woefully unready to meet death as he had adequately lived
ment
that a
life.
The crux of
man, whatever
his
the middle passage
is
in-
the require-
age or station, pull out of his reflexive
behaviors and attitudes, radically reexamine his
life,
and
risk living
out the thunderous imperatives of his soul.
Once having the subsequent
identified the role
mother plays
mother complex with
its
and the loss of the father and the absent of what
we must
Men carry
face
in
our development,
archetypal reverberations,
elders,
we know something
on our own.
their psychological history within, especially the long-
ing of the child for nurturance and protection. That child
is
subse-
quently flung out into the world to fight and ultimately die. Because the
enormous longing
landed
women
mothering the
with
man
in
men have generally this burden. But most women rightly resist their life, so men must take on this role. Robert for a safe harbor persists,
Bly recounts the Australian aborigine
men
sit in
rite
of passage for boys. The
a circle and cut their forearms and press the blood into a
Healing the Souls of Men
communion of blood,
bowl. Then, in a
from
man and youth
older
it,
ished you.
Men
Now
father's
need for nurturance. All creatures need care and feeding.
anyone who has
must accept
their
need for nurturance.
is
nurturance
own
that seeks fulfillment
shame, hold the feminine business of building a
from the
would be
their
it
from
fear of
and
and go about the
empowerment
power complex. The power game
One
life.
that
feels the
one
when
feels
cas-
good energy
permission to dive into feels that there are re-
the forces of darkness are nigh.
helpful to have the
model of
the personal father at
such empowerment, but most men
will
have
to
own.
In effect, the
mother and father complexes are charged
clusters of
own beyond the control of consciousEach man must inventory his own internalized imagos and dis-
energy having a ness.
Then
out there. Personal
men. Empowerment means
close hand to activate
on
seek
inner truth, deal with fear and
and struggle for depth and meaning. One
it
Men
testify.
empowerment is the archetypal father world. He needs to see fa-
in respectful balance,
sources within to draw upon
do
pathological,
And whether they
responsibility.
own
new world
available for the tasks of
it
is
say that
not to be confused with the
Again,
—
on
the archetypal need behind the boy's relationship
we might
ther develop a relationship to his
life
the lonely drifter
put into proper perspective.
is
to his mother, so
trates all
—
they need to recognize that the care and feeding
primarily their
is
need for others
is
dependency
around such a person will
to live
women or other men, of themselves
for
John Wayne, Clint Eastwood model
the plains, the
need
"Mother's milk nour-
alike, saying,
understandably fear being dependent, but they should not
fear their
If
they pass the bowl and drink
blood nourishes you."^"^
The male overcompensation as
127
life
of their
cern what their message
is
regarding the capacity of
life to
How
sustain
it-
self
and the power
ters
charged? With what messages, implicit and explicit? Where have
to fight for
they led to false choices?
^^ Iron John, p.
121.
still
greater
life.
are those clus-
Healing the Souls of Men
128
The same
sort of questions
asked above
in
and grieve the father must be asked by each are his
own wounds and
an effort to understand
man
What Each man must
of himself.
aspirations, his unlived life?
ask anew the questions he wanted his father to ask for him.
If
he
know how to be a man, how to cope with fear, how to find courage, how to make unpopular choices, how to balance masculine and feminine energies, how to locate and move in accord with the soul's gyroscope, he must now risk those questions to himself. And if he does not know the answer he is at least asking the right questions. As Rilke once wrote to a young friend: wanted
Be
to
patient toward
all
that
is
unsolved in your heart and
the questions themselves. ...
Do
not
now seek
try to love
the answers,
which
cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
And
the point
is,
to live everything.
Live the questions now. Per-
haps then you will gradually, without noticing distant
day
it,
live
along some
into the answer.^^
A man must ask himself,
for
example, what fears block me? What
my heart of hearts, know must undertake? What is me to do? Can bring my work and my soul closer together? How can I serve both relationship and individuation? What areas of father's unlived life must occupy and plant my own flag tasks
my
do
life
I,
in
I
calling
I
I
on? Then comes the moment of decisive significance, the
risk, the
man
boldness to live the questions in the existential world. Being a
means knowing what you want and then mobilizing sources to achieve start,
it
is
it.
This
may seem
extraordinarily difficult to
simplistic, but
the inner re-
it is
know what one
not.
wants.
For a
How
does one separate the inner truth from the cacophony of personal
complexes and truth, It
does one is
this
worlds, that
cultural directives?
summon
And how, having
the courage to live
it
discerned one's
in the real
world?
kind of questioning and daring, in outer and inner
makes
a
man. The past and the Satumian weight of
ture play powerful roles, but the
psyche
is
plant the past with insurgent energies to forge a different future.
^^ Letters to a Young Poet, p. 35.
cul-
resourceful and will sup-
Jung
Healing the Souls of Men
once observed
we do
that
not solve our problems,
them.^^ This capacity of the psyche to enlarge possible.
We
all
would
still
mother
like
we
way. But that
not going to happen. Each
is
of the parent complexes and
own
hungers.
What was
man who
now be
arms and
man must shed the direcown decisions, feed his
his
his loss,
in a hostile universe.
was
acti-
self-activated.
as a child had lost his father in
Two. For years he had grieved and unprotected
make
not activated by the parents, or
vated only in partial ways, must recall a
what makes healing
is
long to stand behind father while he leads the
tives
I
we outgrow
to take us in her
nurture us, and
129
World War
always feeling inadequate
He would
often attach himself
powerful or learned men, even occasionally to ideologies,
to
search of the missing father strength and wisdom.
in
One week, while
vacationing by himself in Cape May, he held a series of dialogues
with his dead father, asking
chance
to.
versed and
all
the questions he
He felt a presence within himself, one with whom who did in fact respond to his questions.
Of course he was
own
nature that he himself, by his ques-
imago, a part of his
tions,
had activated. The personal father
a slavish fashion; he tion the father
imago
his questions, fears that
needed
is
to activate
in the son.
When
to serve the purpose, the
can be significantly,
he con-
not talking with his actual father, but with the
father
wounded
had never had a
if
son
is
not there to be imitated in
by example and by affirmathe father is left
is
absent, or too
with the
deficit.
This
not totally, overcome by the son, by turning
and aspirations inward and respecting the images
come. Through active imagination and dreams, the son can be
touch with the empowering father after
The
all.
biological parents are charged with a large responsibility for
transmitting and activating the
life
force in their child,
than they can reasonably achieve, given their
much more
own wounding. But the
son can, through courage and deep soul-work, surpass the tions
in
imposed by
his parent's
limita-
wounds. This work he does not only
^^ "Commentary on 'The Secret of the Golden Flower,'" Alchemical Studies,
CW
17, par.
17.
Healing the Souls of Men
130
and for the world
for himself but for his children
As Nikos Kazantzakis proposed Humanity
What
is
is
which he
in
the task:
such a lump of mud, each one of us
is
lump of mud.
a
our duty? To struggle so that a small flower
from the dunghill of our flesh and
The scarab
beetle,
known
lives.
for
may blossom
mind.^'^
its
habit of rolling dung-balls,
was
sacred to the Egyptians, for they saw, ineluctably, that something living could
wounded 6)
come
out of the dung.
a
soul from the dross of personal history.
Recover the souVs journey.
Men are now are as restricted
free to
by
courage of women tions that
make
who have
many men have men not but,
that their lives to the
protested at traditional roles and institu-
themselves because
away from them
— —thanks
known women's
their first secret
role definitions as are
deny uniqueness and
Predictably,
Women
equality.
have led the way.
resisted the effort of
only
felt
women
to free
something would be taken
even more, they thought they were comfortable
in their rigidly defined
gender
roles.
That
and deforming did not occur to most to
So too may one rescue
their roles
men
until
were oppressive
women
forced them
look more closely.
The average man
reluctant to
still is
examine
his life lest
obliged to change, and change always occasions anxiety. But
one
realizes that the anxiety
accompanying change
is
he be
when
preferable to the
depression and rage occasioned by constriction, change becomes
more
attractive.
when
the infinite possibilities of the individual are subordinated to
Jung noted
that neurosis
is
the necessary
outcome
the restrictions of the culture: I
have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content
themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of
They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined life.
^ The
Saviors of God, p.
109.
Healing the Souls of Men within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their
131
has not sufficient
life
content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into
more
spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.^^
Jung's
list
of false goals and golden idols matches the Western
dream of success,
men do
yet
not feel successful even
have achieved those goals and sacrificed to those
shamed and
easy,
alienated.
man
idols.
They
they
feel un-
can forget the family standing
Loman
around the grave of Willy
Salesman? While
Who
when
in
Arthur Miller's Death of a
Charley offers the eulogy for a working
his friend
driven to ground by tough times, Willy's son speaks the sad
truth:
"Charley, the
Surely there
man didn't know who
no sadder epitaph
is
has worked hard and been broken.
spinning planet,
if
not to try to
for a
Why
know
he was."^^
man, especially one who
else are
we
ourselves?
here,
Men
on
this
still
have stopped
asking the right questions and so suffer a sickness unto death. They
can only save themselves by recovering a sense of their soul's jour-
They have
ney.
to
do
this;
they really have no choice.
Recently an analysand brought the following dream: I
am with
a
man in water. He has a bad leg. He goes under. I should I am not a good swimmer. I have to do something. I
help him but
am
afraid, but
up.
I
dive under and find him on the bottom and pull him
CPR.
give him
I
comes
to
I
had
to
do
it.
No one
else
That drowning ness intuits and
saved when he
man
is
knows
is
the dreamer himself, it
must
rescue.
us;
the proper
After the inner their outer world.
only save and be
own depths and No one can do it for
hero journey of old and dive into our depths.
work of man, the work that saves. work men will be able to take a necessary look Most men
they do not feel valued even
^^ Memories, Dreams,
^ Death
He
willing to take the dive into his
we must renew the is
it.
which ego-conscious-
He may
administer the life-giving re-spiration (spiritus).
This
would do
and breathes.
when
Reflections,
of a Salesman,
p.
at
use their job to validate themselves, but
138.
p.
they have achieved success.
140.
They
.
.
Healing the Souls of Men
132
when they have not done the work Camus noted, "Without work all life goes
use work to validate their identity
As Albert when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.''^^^ While we rotten. But cannot ignore economic realities, we must also ensure that our work give meaning and substance to our lives. It is necessary for men to decide anew, then, who they are and how they will spend their of individuation.
precious energy.
No man may grievous not
wounds
home
leave
body and
to
or be in the world without suffering soul.
But he must learn
my wound or my defense against my wound.
The wounds of
may
life
to say, "I
am my
I
journey."
may quicken
crush the soul or they
am
con-
sciousness. But only ever-greater consciousness can bring luminos-
Miguel de Unamuno sounds the challenge:
the journey.
ity to
Shake off
Throw
sadness, and recover your
this
spirit.
yourself like seed as you walk, and
.
don't turn your face for that would be to turn
and do not
let
Leave what's
the past
move
from your work you
The recovery of himself. the
He must
.
it
to death,
weigh down your motion.
alive in the furrow, what's
for life does not
.
.
in the
will
same way
dead
as a
be able one day
the soul's journey
is
in yourself,
group of clouds,
to gather yourself.i^i
necessary for
man
to
save
again be able to see himself in a larger context, in
framework of the
eternal.
Jung asks of
a
man what we must
all
ask of ourselves: Is
he related
to
something
tion of his life
If
we
infinite or not?
That
is
the telling ques-
understand and feel that here in
this life
we
already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, tial
It
we embody,
we
and
count for something only because of the essen-
if
we do
not
embody
that, life is
wasted. ^^^
man feels at home in some religious He is his journey, and that is what is of
does not matter whether a
or political or domestic form.
^^° Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, p. 96. ^01 "Throw Yourself Like Seed," in Bly et Heart, p. 234. ^^2 Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 325. p.
al.,
Rag and Bone Shop of
the
Healing the Souls of Men
The
decisive significance. is
terror
he
may
on the high seas of
feel
understandable, but in relinquishing the imperative to
giving over to an ideology or to dependency on
manhood.
loses his
It is
time to
come
133
someone
he
else,
acknowledge the
clean,
life
sail on, in
fear,
but live the journey.
The summons to journey is not a justification for narcissism. A man still is obliged to fulfill his commitments to others, to meet his he has an inescapable calling to individuation.
responsibilities. Yet
he forgets that calling, squanders his brief
problem
to those others
anyhow. To
moment on
live the
he
earth,
journey of the soul
is
Then we
luminous
episode between two great mysteries. i^^
7)
this short
will
have incarnated the
invisible,
a
is to
serve nature, to serve others and to serve that mystery of which are the experiment.
If
we
made
Join the revolution.
book seems pessimistic about imminent
If this
somewhat
skeptical about
men's movements,
it
social is
change and
yet optimistic
about the power of individuals to gain consciousness, to find the
courage to change, to reclaim their lives
change
Historically,
sided.
—and thereby bring about
in the world.
change occurs when a culture has become too one-
The compensation
citizens.
It
exists, then, in the
unconscious of
takes a person of intuitive gifts, that
conscious material
is
values to the surface.
more
The
is,
one
to
all its
whom
un-
readily available, to bring those neglected artist,
nates the neglected value in a
perhaps,
is
work ahead of
the its
one
who first He may
time.
incar-
suffer
ridicule or rejection or, worse, indifference, but his seed begins to
may be marcollective. And just so
germinate in the liminal zone of others. The prophet tyred, but his truth has already challenged the
now, the
Change
cat
is in
is
out of the bag, the Satumian cinctures loosened.
the
air.
No wonder
sionaries, for they are
dictators suppress artists
most dangerous
to the
and
Satumian control
vi-
that
group-think requires. ^^^ Jung: "Life ...
is
yet are one." (Letters,
a short episode vol.
1,
p.
483)
between two great mysteries, which
Healing the Souls of Men
134
were property
In the nineteenth century children
Women were
leased to others.
be sold or
to
chattel without rights or respect.
And
from the beginnings of history men have oppressed each other as well. If the rights of children if
women are demanding,
now have
a place in our sensibility, and
and deserving
of, respect,
men have
so
to
become more than soulless machines. The French General Lyautey was admonished, as he set out to plant a certain sapling, that the tree would take a hundred years to reach full maturity. "Why, then we must begin
very afternoon," he replied. ^^"^ So,
this
gin this very day. Each of us
is
It is
time to stop the
man when
none
are.
time to oppose those
who
he has power over another man, or a
time to oppose
It is
lies:
all
who would
unctuous politicians and the
too must be-
part of the problem, or, individually,
part of the solution. Until all are free,
a
we
like
oppress others
—and, most of
say that one
woman,
—
all,
men be
told.
fearful bigots,
time to oppose
the tyrannous silence that perpetuates Saturn's rule,
separating men. Let the secrets of
is
or a child.
shaming and
They
are the Lil-
liputian threads that will bind the giant.
To join the revolution does not oblige one to stand on a soapbox. It
means
that
one
lution begins at
starts to
be honest about one's
home, with oneself.
Now
the reader
not as strange as he might have feared, that he other
men have
own
is
The revo-
life.
knows
that
he
is
not really alone, that
experienced what he has, and that they are suffering
with him side by side.
The
revolution begins
when men
stop deceiving themselves,
when
They will but they may now be honest. They
they acknowledge and take responsibility for their secrets. still
have
have
to struggle
to start at
and
suffer,
home, with themselves, and
realize that the
Satumian
assumptions with which they have grown up castrate and destroy
them as surely as
the tyrant
gods of old with
their severing sickles.
The man who walks out from under Saturn's shadow sonal
life is
or not.
^^'^
The
He
also doing a great thing for others,
has learned that no one has power over him
Little,
Brown Book of Anecdotes,
p.
372.
in his per-
whether they know if
it
he does not
Healing the Souls of Men give
it
ney. His
He
them.
to
on a new meaning and
takes
life
has recovered the worth of his
own
soul's jour-
his prayer, in the
Kazantzakis, "is the report of a soldier to his general: This did today, this
how
is
I
fought to save the entire battle in
sector, these are the obstacles
j-Q^ "105
When
this
man, and
how
found, this
I
I
words of is
begin to take personal responsibility for their
what
I
my own
plan to fight tomor-
man, and the other one over
that
135
lives, the
there,
old tyrants
will lose their grip. It is
Zeus heard rumors about
said that
power
greater than
manner of
power
a
and he was deathly
itself,
in the universe
afraid. In the usual
henchmen Force and Might,
a bully, Zeus, with his
swaggered about and intimidated others. Even Prometheus, whose
name suggests
that revolutionary
rock in the Caucasus. ever.
It is
the force
whose bar even
When the
the
tyrant
all
But
that
bullies
foreknowledge, suffered on the
energy could not be suppressed for-
and tyrants fear
and seek
most men are press other
long
way
their
still
own
is
Justice, before
reject collective
hurt
expec-
path, then justice returns. Yes, currently
oppressed; acting out of their
men and
off.
it
gods are overthrown, when individuals walk out
from under the shadow of Saturn, when they tations
—
gods must tremble.
women
But each of us
is
own
hurt, they op-
and children. Surely, justice
obliged to find
it,
first in
is
a
our hearts
and then on the long road ahead. Traveller,
you have come a long way
But the kingdom of the wish
May you fare
is at
led
by
that star.
the other end of the night.
well, companero; let us journey together joyfully ^^^ light.
Living on catastrophe, eating the pure
10^ The Saviors of God, p. 107. 10^ Thomas McGrath, "Epitaph," Heart, p. 256.
in
Bly
et
al.,
Rag and Bone Shop of
the
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Index
Castration and Male Rage, 94
abaissement du niveau mentale, 88 abandonment, 44-46, 56, 59, 64,
Catlin,
George, 65
Charles, analysand, 45-46
74-75, 109 Adler, Alfred, 25
child, inner,
Agee, James, 12-13
Clinton, President Bill, 35
Allen, analysand, 76-77, 96-98
complex(es): 23-25, 29-30, 57,
Amfortas, Fisher King, 77-78
109, 127-129 father, 13-15, 30, 45-46, 61, 66-
analysis, 7-8, 31-33, 44-47, 49,
70, 83-99, 107-111, 114-119,
52-53, 63, 72, 76-77, 96-98,
127-129
114, 118, 122-123
food, 31-33
anger, 43, 47, 54, 56-59, 79-82,
84-85, 97, 107, 110, 118
mother,
9, 11, 19-20, 29-36, 38, 40-48, 51-57, 65, 69, 77, 83-
anima, 36, 41-43, 47-52, 54, 60,
84, 90-92, 102-111, 126, 128 power, 10-11, 21-27, 35, 58, 8485, 94-95, 103, 127, 134-135
120
64, 103,
animus, 33-34, 49-50 anxiety, 55-57
Aphrodite, 10, 36 archetype/archetypal, 16, 24, 29-30, 32, 38, 40, 42-43, 47-52, 55, 67-68, 72, 83-85, 94-96, 114 Ares, 36 artists,
114, 133
Asclepius, 38
House of, 55 Auden, W.H., 86, 120 Atreus,
54
Berlant, Tony, 8 birth trauma,
virgin-whore, 60
Conrad, Joseph, 88-89
Comeau, Guy, 37 "Country Doctor, The," 111-112 creativity, 114-115 Cronus (see also SdXMm), 10, 110 cummings, e.e., 99 Cynthia, analysand, 31-33 Dante, 54, 78, 86 Death of a Salesman, 131 "Death of Ivan Ilyich, The," 126 death-rebirth motif, 18, 84 Demian, 109
Bailey, Pearl, 25 Beatrice,
51
56
Blake, William, 28, 58, 87
depression, 52, 57, 75, 82, 110,
Bly, Robert, 85, 91-93, 126
117-118, 130 dreams, 19, 31-32, 52-54, 68-69, 76-77, 96-98, 129, 131
bra burning, 21-22
Buddhism, 123 Campbell, Joseph, 65, 78, 101 Camus, Albert, 132
Cape
Fear,
24
castration, 10, 94,
Duino Elegies, 28-29, 42 Dunn, Stephen, 42 eating disorders, 31-33
110
ego, 29, 49, 109, 114, 124, 131
140
Index 141 elders (see also tribal fathers), 16-17,
20, 66-70, 76, 91, 116, 123,
125-127 Eliade, Mircea, 16, 66 Eliot, T.S., 78 Empedocles, 41 eros, 10-11, 25, 30, 41, 56, 60, 65,
67, 95, 103, 121, 125
Eros, as god,
28
Heracles, 37-38, 40 hero/heroic, 37-38, 40-41, 52, 63,
105-106, 121-122 Hesse, Herman, 109 Hillman, James, 26, 91 Hitler, Adolf, 88, 95
Homer, 63 homophobia, 123-125 homosexuals/homosexuality, 35-36,
109 father/father complex, 13-15,30, false self,
48, 103, 110, 124 Hopcke, Robert, 73 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 80
45-46, 61, 66-70, 83-99,
107-111,114-119,127-129
Iliad,
24-25, 29, 35-36, 40, 42-48, 51-52, 56-61, 94,
impotence, 24
fear, 9, 11,
101-104, 110, 120-128 feminine (see also anima): 27-61
men's fear
of, 30,
35-36, 42-48,
57-61, 94, 102-104
Finding Our Fathers, 84 Fisher King, 77-78 food complex, 31-33 football, 70-72, 80-81 Friedrich, Kaspar David, 41 Freud, Sigmund, 25, 33, 38, 56
63
incest, 52, 110,
118
individuation, 39, 72, 89-91, 108,
133 inflation, 33,
94
initiation (see also rites
of passage),
16-17, 65-68 introspection,
46
"Iron Hans," 69n, 91 "Iron John," 91-93, 96 isolation, 19, 25,
-
40
Jesus, 125
Gauguin, Paul, 75 Ge/Gaia, 10 George, analysand, 49 Gerald, analysand, 63 Gillette, Douglas, 94 Glengarry Glen Ross, 73 Grail legend,
78
Johnson, Robert, 78 Joseph, analysand, 44-46
"Judgment, The," 86-87 Jung, 10, 16, 26, 29, 33, 35, 38, 47, 51, 54-55, 65, 72, 90, 114,
119, 121, 128, 130-132 justice,
135
Great Depression, 13-14
Great Mother, 38, 40, 47, 83-84 117-118, 128
Kafka, Franz, 86-87, 89-90, 111-112 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 130, 135 Keen, Sam, 91
Haggard, H. Rider, 47 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 87 Hay den, Robert, 117 He, 78 healing, seven steps, 115-135
Kennedy, President John, 88 Kierkegaard, Soren, 8 king, 77-78, 92, 94-95
grief, 57, 115,
Hemingway,
Ernest,
63
King, Warrior, Magician, Lover:
Rediscovering the Achetypes of the Mature Masculine, 94-95
142 Index Ladies Home Journal 24
opposites, 83, 114
Larkin, Philip, 75, 82
Osherson, Sam, 84
Lawrence, analysand, 52-53 Lawrence, D.H., 39, 112 Lee, John, 21 lover archetype, 95 Lyautey, General, 134
Owen,
Wilfrid,
62
patriarchy (see also Saturn, legacy of), 48, 58, 83,
93-99, 103,
110, 123
Pederson, Loren, 47
machoism, 35-36, 40, 74, 91, 103, 120, 122 magician archetype, 95 Marx, Karl, 26 matter, as mother, 32-33, 37, 66 McKem, Leo, 47 Meade, Michael, 91 men's movement, 21-26, 85-86, 91-93, 115 mentors/mentoring, 122-123, 125 Middle Passage, The, 90, 125 military, 35-36, 103 Miller, Arthur, 131 minnesingers, 57 Monick, Eugene, 93-94 Moore, Robert, 94 mother/mother complex, 9, 11, 1920, 29-36, 37-38, 40-48, 51-57,
personal unconscious, 29-30 phallos,
94
Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine, 93-94 Philoctetes, 37-38, 40, 52,
Physis,
playboy, 60
power/power complex, 10-11, 21-27, 35, 58, 84-85, 94-95, 103, 127, 134-135 projection, 23-25, 27, 30, 34, 36,
38, 41-42, 46, 49-50, 53-56,
59-60, 64, 69, 88, 109
Prometheus, 135 psyche, levels
of, 29,
rage, 25, 28, 38, 42-44, 47-48, 59-
60, 79-82, 84-85, 107, 115,
120-121, 125, 130
102-111, 126, 128 "Mourning and Melancholy," 56
rape, 42, 57, 79,
"My
reaction formation, 45
myth, 18, 37-38, 40-41, 51, 67, 70, 77-79, 83-84, 86, 92, 108, 115, 121, 123
32
puer aeternus, 45
65-66, 69, 77, 83-84, 90-92,
Kinsman, Major Molineaux," 87
106
112
93
"Red Surrender, The," 73 regression, 38-40, 51-52, 121 relationship, religion,
103-104
30
Rhea, 10 narcissism, 38, 47, 52, 59, 95, 133 Neruda, Pablo, 120 neurosis,
3%
Richard, analysand, 76 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 28-30, 42, 90,
113-114, 130-131
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 64, 103, 123
100, 115, 128
Norman, analysand, 67-70, 72
of passage, 16-21, 24, 65-77, 105-108, 122, 126-127 ritual, see initiation an^ rites of
Oedipus, 52
role expectations, 21, 25, 27, 100-
Niklaus,
St.,
75
rites
passage Olds, Sharon, 116
101, 130
Index 143
Straw Dogs, 24
Romanticism, 41, 57 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 12 "Rumpole of the Bailey," 47
suffering, 19, 40-41, 132,
"Symbolic sacrifice, 70-71, 88, 95, 107,
Life, The," 16,
72
125
Santa Fe, 22-24, 124 Sassoon, Siegfried, 62 Saturn: legacy of (see also patriarchy), 10, 12-27, 75-77,
80-81, 85-86, 95, 104, 115119, 125, 128-129, 133-135
shadow
of, see shadow, Satumian "Saturn," 116-117 scarab beetle, 130 Schwartz, Delmore, 79 Secret Sharer, The, 88-89
secrets, men's, 9, 11, 21, 24, 30,
Self,
134
symbol, 113-115
Thanatos, 41 therapy, see analysis
Thomas, Dylan,
18,
83
Thoreau, Henry, 120 "Those Winter Sundays," 117 Tolstoy, Leo, 126 transcendent function, 114-115 transference/countertransference, tribal fathers (see
48
also elders), 27,
85, 107-108, 114-115 Trump, Donald, 94
Unamuno, Miguel, 132
73, 79, 88-89, 99-110, 119-
unlived
122, 134
Uranus, 10
life,
33-34, 54-55, 90, 119
114
separation anxiety, 55-56
106
serial killers, 42,
serpent motif, 38-39, 53
Venus, 36
Vietnam, 63 virgin-whore complex, 60
sex/sexuality, 28, 35, 46-47, 50,
60, 64-65, 103-104, 118, 121 shadow: 23-24, 26-27, ^S, 94-96 Satumian, 8-11, 13-15, 24, 27,
87-88, 96-99, 113, 115-119,
133-135 Shakespeare, William, 11 shame, 24-25, 63-64, 71-78, 94, 96, 102, 104-105, 107, 110, 122 Shapiro, Karl, 63
Walder, Paul, 95
Wanderer Above the Mists, The, 41 warrior archetype, 95
"Wasteland, The," 78
We 've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse, 26 witch, 31-32
"Snake," 39 Social Contract, The, 12
work, 14-15, 75-77, 80-82, 85-86, 100-101, 116-117, 131-132 World War Two, 14-15, 129 wounding, necessary, 64-82, 90, 105-106
sociopath, 43
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 54
S^he,
Sky
47 Father,
"Sometimes
83-84
I
Feel Like a Mother-
less Child,"
57
yearning for eternity, 41
Sophocles, 37, 95 Speck, Richard, 42
Yeats, William Butler, 106
Stephen, analysand, 46-47, 49
Zeus, 10, 135
55
5
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Under Saturn's Shadow Saturn was the infamous
Roman god who ate his children m an Men throughout history
stop them from usurping his power.
attempt to
have been
psychologically and spiritually burdened by the Saturnian legacy, suffering
from the corruption of empowerment, driven by
their fear
of
women and
wounding themselves and others. In Under Saturn 's Shadow, the acclaimed author of The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife (Inner City, 1993) addresses these issues and more, suggesting practical ways in which men may reother men,
claim their sense of personal integrity.
Women as well for
its
as
men
will find this
book well worth
revelation and elucidation of the "secrets"
its rich perspective on what from the worst influences of patriarchy.
but also for
we
all
men
reading, not only
carry in their hearts,
must do
to free ourselves
James Hollis, Ph.D., is a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. He has lectured extensively in North America on mythology and religion, men's issues and midlife. He has a private practice in Philadelphia and Linwood,
New
Jersey,
where he
lives.
780919"123649