My approach to therapy

I had the whimsical notion the other day of placing an ad for my practice in local newspapers.

"Work with me in therapy
 and I will not respect you as a person...
 but I will respect you as a man."

Catchy? Intriguing? Offensive?

Culture critic Jack Malebranche makes this observation:

Our culture’s strategy for integrating women into the workforce has unfortunately been to strip men of any distinct virtues, qualities, social roles or responsibilities. This is one of the great tragedies of our time, and time will tell if this gender neutral society thing is really sustainable, practical or even truly desirable.

He's got an interesting point. In order to make room for women over the last 40 years, in realms where men had either dominated or held exclusive sway, the approach has been to make men genderless....which usually means making them less male.

I hear it when men say that they want to be or are "a good person."

This is supposed to show that they have transcended the narrowness of gender roles. But is that finally possible without some deeper loss? Are we not really gendered beings?

Female therapists who advertise themselves as feminist therapists get no flack for that. What if I advertised myself as a pro-male therapist or even a "masculinist"? How do you think that would go down?

______________________________

UnLiberating Therapy

One of the ironies of most counseling and therapy nowadays is that it is constrained by the rules of Political Correctness. Political Correctness is a set of rules for speaking and thinking. No matter what you experience or think or feel, these rules tell you what the right attitudes are, the right words, the right thoughts. Anything that contradicts the rules is swiftly and harshly condemned. And so is the person who breaks them. Political Correctness infects the psychological world at all levels. This is ironic because when Sigmund Freud, the most famous of the founders of this new discipline, set out to investigate human psychology, he broke and contradicted some of the most powerful rules of his place and time. He talked openly and in detail about sex. In our culture we hear and speak about sex all the time. In his, it was a deeply taboo subject. Very much Politically In Correct. Part of the point of therapy is getting at the truth. And especially at truths that we...

Useless Men?

This incredibly brain-dead op-ed piece in the New York Times , written by a "man", informs us that since (male-created) technology allows women to have children on their own, men are no longer necessary. This is a wide-spread meme today and one more indication that men who are looking for an ally in solving their problems need to take care. My response to this ludicrous exercise in self-hatred is very simple: Women make babies. Men make civilizations. ---

What makes a man a man?

"Common to many societies, men must 'impregnate women, protect dependents from danger, and provision kith and kin'." Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity David D. Gilmore, 1991 This much seems to be written, as it were, in the male body as its basic syntax, its classic form, in the primal language of testosterone: To make and raise children with females To protect the group from animal predators and other human males. To hunt and thus provide meat/fish. Sounds like it comes down to...well, sex and violence. Or, more alliteratively and less provocatively: Procreation, protection and protein. A place to start. I assume that the evolutionary theory is basically correct and that the hunter-gatherer society is the primal human organization that still fundamentally shapes us as a species. “Reading” the male physically and socially, I am hypothesizing that the male gender is meant for three fundamental purposes: procreating, protecting the group from anim...

AndroTherapy SF

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