Introduction

Appearing before a parliamentary commission on mental health issues, Hubert Wallot, a physician and professor at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi, recently expressed his concern that no government has established a council on the status of men. With the support of statistical evidence, he undertook to illustrate the precarious condition of men's general health:

During their childhood and adolescence, men are more likely [than women] to suffer from slow mental development, a short attention span due to "hyperactivity," behavioral problems, "hyperanxiety," schizoid difficulties, transient or chronic spasms, stuttering, functional enuresis and encopresis [involuntary urination and defecation], sleepwalking and nightmares, autism, as well as persistent and specific developmental problems such as dyslexia. As adults, men make up a significant percentage of those who present personality disorders related to paranoia and compulsive or antisocial behavior (as evidenced by the large number of them in prisons). Men also far outnumber women in the frequency of transexuality and sexual perversions.

Dr. Wallot notes that four times as many men suffer from alcoholism and drug addiction as do women; they also outnumber women three to one in the areas of suicide and high-risk behavior. In addition, men are more prone than women to schizophrenia. Dr. Wallot concludes that the frequent absence of the father or of masculine models for young male children "seems to explain certain behavioral difficulties connected with men's affirmation of their sexual identity."

In short this implies that, in spite of their seemingly independent nature, many men are looking for their fathers—and many of them are in need of help. I have seen for myself how great their need is, how anxious they are to get together and discuss it. In the spring of 1987, after giving a lecture entitled "The Fear of Intimacy and Repressed Aggressivity in Men," I decided to organize a one-day workshop for a group of men. On Saturday morning there were twenty-one of them waiting for me in the hall of the Jung Center in Montreal. These included fathers, married and divorced men, bachelors, gay men, a punk, a cook, a decorator, an accountant, artists, welfare recipients, therapists, civil servants, and teachers; they ranged in age from twenty to fifty. It turned out to be an amazing experience, a day filled with utterly astonishing confessions and revelations. When it came to an end, all the participants decided to continue meeting and working together on a regular basis.

In response to my first question, "Do you feel like a man?" not one of them answered in the affirmative, not even the older ones who had been married for twenty years, or the ones who had children. It quickly became apparent that our sense of identity does not necessarily correspond to our life experiences, but rather to our inner sense of a solid foundation or its lack.

This lack of foundation in the lives of men today is what I want to talk about in this book. I want to talk about the feelings of misery these men expressed in the group sessions and the problems other men confessed to when they were alone with me in my office. I also want to talk about the things we began to open up and explore together, especially the fragility of masculine identity.

This fragility is perhaps reflected in the fact that, fairly typically, men today decide to have their first child at the age of thirty-five or forty, which is a good deal later in life than they had started families in previous generations. Could it be that this time lag is a measure of the number of years men now need to consolidate their own identity? This seems to me to be the case, even though a lot of other factors also come into play for these children of the postwar baby boom: a greater degree of individualism, more physical comfort, an increase in stress, the incredible proliferation of technological innovations, and, of course, a terrible sense of uncertainty about the future of our planet. It is interesting to look at these questions from an exclusively psychological point of view, though, and this is what I propose to do.

The raw material for this book comes from clinical observations in my practice as an analyst. All the cases have been disguised, except in their essential details, and the material has been used only with the consent of the individuals involved. Also, it should be kept in mind that my examples and my interpretations deal with only one facet of a person, so only one fragment of the individual's personality is presented in each instance. It would be a mistake, then, to dramatize the cases in question by either oversimplifying them or to make excessive generalizations based on material that is necessarily incomplete. In several instances I have created fictitious characters by combining the experiences of several different people.

My discussion is also based on symbolic images of dreams and on images from the unconscious, which always add richness and variety to our observations. These images have the great advantage of providing a less abstract basis for the investigation of any particular theme, and they address the world of emotions directly. As Jung said, nothing is less scientific than the analysis of dreams; their relevance, however, makes an impression on our minds and sets us to thinking about the unknown that lies within each of us. After all, is it not by imagining a thing intensely, by trying to fit an image to an emotion, and by letting our most secret fantasies rise to the surface, that we can most effectively understand the nature of psychological phenomena? Is this not how we objectify these phenomena in order to dialogue with them? Mythological stories play the same role as these images: they put our contemporary experiences into perspective by revealing the ways in which our experiences are eternally human.

This book is a synthesis of what I have read, seen, heard, and felt about men in the past three years, and of what I have felt about my own life as a man. I do not claim that the ideas developed here are in any way full or complete. Making such a claim is not my goal, and in any case I do not insist on being "right." In point of fact, I deal only with those themes that grip me from within.

The question of the father and masculine identity surges up into our contemporary world from the depths of the collective unconscious. The best we can do is consider the question and try to remain open to new developments as they evolve. The images that inhabit us propel us toward the future. I do not know what a man is, and know even less what a man should be. Rather I try to feel what he is and to get to know him from the inside. I try to let the man within myself emerge into the light.

There is no perfect model for man, just as there is no perfect family. We are all the products of a more or less inadequate past that pushes us forward and forces us to adapt creatively. Many of our parents had to struggle to secure their material necessities, and so their consciousness is largely defined by their need to assure their physical survival. They speak only through their actions, unable to give verbal expression to their love or their disappointments. They have trouble disengaging their individuality from their function as father and mother, and they feel awkward about expressing their inner feelings.

Through the window of our own awareness we can glimpse a world so different from theirs that any chance of a dialogue with them seems impossible. This is because the frames of our windows are psychological, and we view the world through them as a network of psychological relations. We should not forget, however, that the very education and material security made possible by our parents enable us to respond to the internal needs that concern us today.

It is not fathers and mothers that I judge in this book—it is the silence that envelops us all. The role of sons, now, is to break through this silence finally. The soul of the world always goes into hiding wherever there is trouble and disorder; this hidden soul is tormenting men today. More than ever before, we are sitting in the hot seat of change.