A hundred years ago

CG Jung gave some excellent advice to therapists:

Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology*. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world.

There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-halls, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul.

-- Carl Jung (from "New Paths in Psychology", in Collected Papers on Analytic Psychology, London, 1916)

*The laboratory psychology of his time.

How men grieve

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...

Men On Strike Against Marriage

The decreasing numbers of men getting married is a natural response to the changes in the institution. The risks are far higher and the rewards far less reliable than they used to be. Men are not afraid of commitment; they're afraid of being ransacked. Check out this piece. And here's a similar take:

A sign of the times

When I was doing internships in middle schools in San Francisco it became clear to me that the high number of boys under medication was part of a feminist education culture that found incipient maleness unacceptable. I used to call this high-risk condition SWM, Studying While Male. I'm not the only one . Boys are under attack because men are. So frankly, a man who wants to work with a counselor would do well to make sure that it's someone who respects who he is. Not just as a "person," but as a man. ---

AndroTherapy SF

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