Archive for January 3rd, 2012
Wounded Men – Telling It Like It Is
Adolescence - a boy moving towards being a man in the Philippines
I was pleased to find this photo so easily when looking for one to go with this post about adolescence and the masculine. Adolescence is the fourth stage in the masculine transformation as discussed in Eugene Monick’s book, Castration and Male Rage. There is a real issue concerning how we raise young males in the modern world. How does a culture move from being a paternalistic society to one in which there is an equal honouring of the masculine and the feminine. We cannot solve the issue with simply having the power in the modern world shift to favour the feminine, to create a matriarchal society. Of course, for real change we need to have individuals parent consciously, parents who are aware of the stages of development in their children, both the girl children and the boy children. Perhaps that is asking too much of parents.
The task then falls to the child turned adult, the adult to do the work to reclaim his or her balanced psychological gender identity, reclaiming the individual self from the claws of buried complexes which are too closely bound to even more powerful archetypes. Dr. Urspo has mentioned Robert Bly’s book, Iron John, and John Ferric has also provided further links for us to look deeper into the issues that are acting out in modern men and their behaviour to the environment, their communities and to the women with whom they come in contact. This behaviour is problematic, not the behaviour of psychologically mature males. Often, it seems as though our men are more like teen-aged boys rampaging through the world high on testosterone leaving a trail of wreckage behind them. When maturity does finally arrive, it arrives too late most times. The wreckage of broken families, damaged females, raped environments and plundered communities are left in the wake of these men who never quite grew up to be mature, psychologically balanced people.
It feels to me that I need to stop here so that these words can sit exposed, telling it like it is, before I continue with more of Monick’s words.
Until the next post . . .
