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The origins of this paper began six years ago when
my son, then aged 12, came home from school asking
for a note to be excused the next day.
"I don't want to have to go to a stupid sexual
harassment class!" he announced. When I inquired
about his, I discovered that his Upper East Side
State of the Art Private Educational Institution
was offering a course on sexual harassment for boys
as the counterpart of "Take Your Daughter To
Work Day."
After writing out his excuse, I decided it was
time to find out just what was going on. My ex-wife
gave me hell for writing to the school, "making
trouble" and moving to action so quickly, presuming
to act in my son's life without consulting her.
As far as I can tell, she saw no impropriety in
the school's request.
I decided it was time to find out just what was
going on. My inquiries have led to this paper.
Every patient arrives at our doorstep from a different
world. Men and women have an individual context
to their lives and a personal cultural context.
Often the successful outcome of treatment depends
on their first estimations of us and our counter-transference
of liking, hopefulness or aversion toward them.
Understanding the women who come to us and finding
context of their lives is usually easier. They have
a context in the women's movement and are struggling
to master one or more of its elements.
What about our male patients? What is the cultural
context for men today? Much less is known about
men and in that vacuum there is stereotyping. Often,
men are considered to be a different kind of animal,
from Mars, alexithymic and prone to anger.
Therapists are often faced with questions about
strategies toward these supposedly angry, non-verbal,
action dominated men. Do they require different
forms of individualized treatment or can they take
a one size fits all and prescribe anger management
courses for these creatures prone to control and
perpetrators of domestic violence? Does our counter-transference
run in the direction of overestimating men's capabilities,
seemingly self-composed, as they try to control
their emotions in the frightening territory of our
office, or do we underestimate their anguish simply
because they are men?
Before we go much farther we can give ourselves
a little true / false test about some common places
that tint the vision of our society and are likely
to color our attitudes as therapists:
Statement # 1
A couple comes to your office. The woman is working,
the man is out of work and is not looking very hard
because he is enjoying staying home and taking care
of the children.
You think : What's wrong with this man? Is his wife
angry about this? If not, shouldn't she be angry
about this?
True or false?
A couple comes to your office. The man is working,
the woman has lost her job and is not looking very
hard because she is enjoying staying home and taking
care of the children.
You think: If the family can manage, this might
be good for the children.
True or false?
Statement # 2
A couple comes to you and the wife complains that
her husband is shoving and pushing her.
You think: He's abusive and this is potentially
dangerous. Look out. She needs protection.
True or false?
A couple comes to you and the husband complains
that his wife is shoving him around. You think:
She's inappropriate and better stop or he may let
her have it!
Again, she needs protection.
True or false?
Stastement # 3
"Boys will be boys, and men are likely to
get into trouble because they are born that way...
Where there are boys and men there is testosterone
and where there are male hormones there will always
be a thirst for aggression, violence and lustful
sex without commitment". (Note
1)
True or false?
This last toxic view of men appears to be part
of the staple consciousness of a generation that
has been massively influenced by psychological change
for women. Women's liberation has been achieved,
in the popular mind, by throwing off the yoke of
oppressive male influence. The yang of women's liberation
has often emerged as a tendency to create a national
mentality of victimage in women and a silent crisis
in masculinity. This sense that there is an unspoken
byproduct to societal advances for women is well
described in the following quote from the fly leaf
of a textbook for therapy with men:
" For the past thirty years, assumptions,
myths, and conventional expectations about what
it is to be a man, men's role, and male identity
have been fundamentally challenged. Attempts have
been made to discredit or reject even the most familiar
aspects of traditional manhood."(Note
3)
This thirty years has also spanned the entirety
of my working life as a psychoanalyst. During this
time, I have participated in the liberation of hundreds
of female patients spurred on, in part, by a stream
of analytic thought.
During that same thirty years of uplift for women
and upheaval for men, I have had no corresponding
training in awareness of men's mental health problems.
Even worse, I have been made to feel out of step
for trying to raise a therapeutic consciousness
about men's issues. When I asked a national psychiatric
organization's Committee on Women to aid me in establishing
a corresponding Committee on Men's Issues I was
told that, " The whole Association was devoted
to men's concerns". In effect, I was being
informed by the leaders in the women's issues movement
in psychiatry that they had no corresponding interest
in the problems being created for men by the social
changes they were advocating.
Perhaps as a result of this silence on men's needs
we have all been relegated to the slow track for
understanding interconnected gender based psychological
influences.
Only slowly and painfully have I learned how to
work with the contemporary problems of the men who
braved their own tradition of self reliance to seek
help. And, while attempting to work psychoanalytically,
realized that the fundamental models of my craft
were in large part mother/child paradigms or that
the development of autonomy, so eagerly embraced
for women's development, left me with mixed feelings
when applied to men. The question I asked myself
was whether in creating stronger men, was I creating
a class of more psychologically adept aggressors?
This paradox would surface as I listened to the
complaints of women of all ages. Bye and large,
they felt their male partners were dominating and
controlling.
When I listened more carefully, I thought I heard
echoes of feminine self centeredness. These complaints
of being controlled or misunderstood had a strange
twist whereby the men were being held to a higher
standard by these women. The women seemed disappointed
that their husbands and boyfriends didn't have the
same sensitivities and react to them the way their
girlfriends did.
These women wanted men with whom they could share
intimacies as with their female confidants. Often
these women wanted the kind of intimate relation
they had with their girl friend without the sense
that their husbands could not collude with them
around female concerns that amounted to a battle
of the sexes. Neither the men nor the women were
able to appreciate the fragile psychological space
inhabited by this new generation of men and the
conflicted aspirations of today's women for both
power and love. Neither could the woman understand
the man's striving for equality in his family life
and at the same time society's expectation that
men remain powerful earners and good soldiers.
To illustrate some of our contemporary confusions
I want to cite two tragic cases and ask for your
spontaneous counter-transferential responses.
Case # 1:
"California: Man Kills 4:
A man shot his 5 year old daughter and his former
wife's children to death, then turned the gun on
himself while the woman was on her morning walk.
The woman discovered the killings after she returned
from her walk."
Case #2:
"A national gasp went up when Andrea Pia Yates
was found guilty in a Texas courtroom of capital
murder...
Mrs Yates had been described over and over during
the trial as mentally ill, suffering from hallucinations,
postpartum psychoses and suicidal tendencies...
"How could any mother after giving birth to
those five babies seen on the haunting home videos,
do what she did: drown them systematically one after
the other..."
In case #1, where the father killed his 5 year
old daughter and stepchildren, there is no discussion
of psychological impairment or depression. If anything,
the reported facts would direct the listener's attention
to the pathos of the mother coming home and finding
her children murdered. The reader is led to a sense
of outrage toward the man and pity for the woman.
By contemporary standards of treatment this man
needed anger management courses. This was a man
deranged by anger.
Initially, we suggested the standard treatment
for men was an anger management course. A more culturally
holistic perspective on his anger, if that was the
underlying emotion, would begin with the sense that
anger is never In Men, it is always in
a Particular Man.
Anger is often in response to a strongly felt need
or a deep sense that a cherished ideal is slipping
from his grasp. Anger is often in defense of home,
hearth, companions or children. Or, perhaps, anger
is a reaction to the fear of a world the man did
not ask for and was being crushed by. His anger
could more likely have been about loss of self image,
esteem, worth; and loss of a sense of power to create
or maintain what was important to him.
In short, anger is not for management as much as
it begs for understanding in the context of an individual
man in today's culture clash between men and women.
In Case #2, a cultural analysis goes beyond the
obvious diagnosis of delusional depression . The
prosecution made a case against Andrea Yates on
the grounds of motherhood, and motherhood trumped
mental illness. Her conviction was for being a bad
mother at a time when the cult of motherhood transcended
even the personal needs generated by a psychotic
depression.
Read Part
2 of this article.
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