I once asked a new patient, “Tell me what kind of man you are.”
He said, "Oh."
How would you answer it?
Men, it seems, have ways of grieving a loss that can be quite different from women's ways. I've just started reading this new book about that by Daniel Duggan. Be it over death, loss of employment, a breakup, guys have their own path. One of the complaints of the early feminists was that, like Aristotle or Melvin Udall*, our culture always assumed that the male was the standard human and so women were always treated like strangely defective males. The revolutionary turnabout in our culture in the last 50 years has produced the precisely opposite situation, especially in the world of counseling and therapy: what is wrong with men is that they are not enough like women! This conflict often shows up between husbands and wives who lose a child, where their gender-specific ways of handling such a grievous loss become grounds for the further tragedy of divorce. The author of Men, Grief and Solitude shows that, among other male-specific patterns, some reactions to loss and...