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Nobody is born a man — across almost every culture, manhood is something earned, not given. This lecture from Academy of Ideas explores why so many men now fail to earn it. Drawing on David Gilmour’s study of manhood and Jung’s psychology, it traces the problem to regression: the pull back toward the safety of the mother, and the missing rites of passage that once broke that bond. Without real initiation, many men fall into boy psychology or the hollow swagger of Peer Gynt. The cure is a heroic attitude built on self-reliance, struggle, and an achieved self.
Full Video Transcript
A man can’t go out the way he came in. A man has got to add up to something.
In our previous series on Carl Jung and the man-child, we looked at why the phenomenon of the man-child is so prevalent in our times.
We argued that due to the demise of the traditional family and an absence of rights of initiation,
many boys lack male role models to show them the way to manhood,
and so they are emerging into adulthood stuck in what the authors Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette called boy psychology.
In this series, we are going to provide a guide for how to outgrow boy psychology and
attain manhood.
To do this, we are going to look away from contemporary Western culture, which is overwhelmed
by ideas which view masculinity as toxic, and approach the topic of manhood from an
anthropological point of view.
Drawing from David Gilmour’s classic book, Manhood in the Making, we will examine what
differing cultures across the world have thought regarding the question, what does it mean
to be a man?
The purpose of this examination will be to isolate the traits, virtues, and attitudes essential to manhood,
thereby creating a map of manhood we can use to outgrow our boy psychology
and achieve the benefits which, cross-culturally, are the prerogative of the potent man.
In the present crisis of masculinity, we do not need, as some feminists are saying, less masculine power.
We need more. But we need more of the mature masculine. We need more man psychology.
We need to develop a sense of calmness about masculine power, so we don’t have to act out dominating, disempowering behavior toward others.
To begin, we must differentiate between biological maleness and manhood.
Practically all cultures across the world acknowledge that a man is a biological male by virtue of being born with male reproductive organs.
Manhood, on the other hand, is not defined by the presence of physical characteristics alone. It must be achieved.
The aboriginal fox tribe of Iowa call the attainment of manhood the big impossible, which only the masterful few can attain.
Unlike biological sex, manhood is not a given, but a prize to be won.
As the 20th century American author Norman Mailer wrote,
Nobody was born a man. You earned manhood provided you were good enough, bold enough.
Or as David Gilmour explains,
There is a constantly recurring notion that real manhood is different from anatomical maleness.
That it is not a natural condition that comes about spontaneously through biological maturation,
but rather is a precarious or artificial state that boys must win against powerful odds.
This recurrent notion that manhood is problematic is found among the simplest hunters and fishermen,
among peasants and sophisticated urban people.
It is found in all continents and environments.
To understand why it is almost universally accepted that real men are made, not born,
we must investigate what cross-culturally is considered the greatest threat to manhood,
psychological regression.
In contrast to other animals who emerge into this world with a certain degree of autonomy,
the first year of a human’s life is spent in a prolonged state of dependence on the mother.
Just as a fetus is contained physically in the mother prior to birth,
in the first year of life the infant can be said to be contained psychologically in the mother.
From the perspective of the infant, the mother appears symbolically as the great mother.
She is the child’s world, and the provider of love, security, warmth, protection, and the all-nourishing breast.
After the first year of life, the child enters the stage which Margaret Mailer called separation-individuation.
The infant’s growing awareness of itself as separate from the mother, coupled with an increase in physical mobility,
marks the stage at which the child is expected to develop its autonomy and self-identity.
While both girls and boys experience the growing pains associated with this stage of development,
It is a stage which can prove especially difficult for boys.
For while the girl’s prior psychological immersion in the mother serves to promote her feminine identity,
the boy, to achieve a masculine identity, must rescind his identification with the mother in the feminine world in order to enter the world of men.
The special problem the boy faces at this point is in overcoming the previous sense of unity with the mother
in order to achieve an independent identity defined by his culture as masculine.
The girl does not experience this problem as acutely, according to this theory, because her femininity is reinforced by her original symbiotic unity with her mother,
by the identification with her that precedes self-identity and that culminates with her own motherhood.
In most societies, the little boy’s sense of self as independent must include a sense of self as different from his mother, as separate from her both in ego-identity and in social role.
Thus, for the boy, the task of separation and individuation carries an added burden and peril.
Throughout history, rites of initiation have assisted boys in the process of separation-individuation.
Through trials and tests overseen by male elders, the boy dies and is reborn a man.
Femininity unfolds naturally, whereas masculinity must be achieved.
And here is where the male ritual cult steps in.
But in the modern West, adequate male role models capable of initiating a boy into manhood
are few and far between.
Many men are emerging into adulthood without having left the psychological womb of the mother.
As a result of not being taught how to embrace struggle, become self-reliant,
and engage in the ceaseless enterprise which cross-culturally is expected of the potent man,
many men are consumed by lethargy, the desire to evade reality,
and escape danger by seeking solace at the mother’s side.
They are succumbing to what Thomas Gregor, in his study of the Mehunaku tribe of Brazil,
referred to as the desire to take the path back to fusion with the mother and the pleasures of infancy.
Or in other words, they are consumed by what Carl Jung called the spirit of regression,
who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious.
In succumbing to the spirit of regression, we adopt lifestyles antithetical to manhood.
One such lifestyle which Jung repeatedly warned of is what in mythological terms is referred to as
the incestuous marriage to the mother, whereby one remains in the psychological womb of the
mother well into old age.
If this situation is dramatized, then there appears before you on the psychological stage
a man living regressively, seeking his childhood and his mother, fleeing from a cold cruel
world which denies him understanding.
Often a mother appears beside him who apparently shows not the slightest concern that her little
son should become a man, but who, with tireless and self-immolating effort, neglects nothing
that might hinder him from growing up and marrying.
You behold the secret conspiracy between mother and son, and how each helps the other to betray
life.
Others consumed by the spirit of regression may break free from the psychological womb
of the mother only to adopt the lifestyle of Pierre Gint, which the psychologist Rollo
May called the myth of males in the 20th century.
Pierre Gint is the myth, that is, the life pattern, of a man characterized by two desires.
One desires to be admired by women, and the other desires to be taken care of by the same
women.
The first desire leads to machismo behavior, a braggart, he swaggers and is grandiose.
But all of this apparent power is in the service of pleasing the woman, the figurative queen,
in order that the second desire be satisfied.
These two desires are contradictory.
The woman is the one who holds the final judgment and, correspondingly, the power over him.
No matter how much he appears to be the swaggering master with his various women, he is in reality
a slave serving the queen. His self-esteem and his self-image depend upon her smile,
her approval. The spirit of regression can also lead to the adoption of harmful lifestyles
not centered around psychological dependence on a woman. As Eric Neumann argues in his
book, the fear of the feminine, world weariness, neurotic sickness, or the placid acceptance
of the commonplace in the attempt to avoid struggle, can all signify that the spirit
of regression is active in our mind. Regressions of this sort give rise not only to typical
anxiety, neuroses, and phobias, but also, and especially, to addictions and, if the
ego is extensively destroyed, to psychoses.
To break free from the spirit of regression and move towards manhood, we need to cultivate
a heroic attitude.
This attitude has been expressed in countless myths, one of the most notable being the dramatic
tale of Tannhäuser and Venus.
In this myth, the knight Tannhäuser is approached by the beautiful goddess Venus, who asks him
to join her on the mountain Venusburg, where she promises his every desire will be satisfied
by her and her attendants, the Neads and Sirens.
Taunheuser accepts her offer and remains in this paradisal feminine world for a year,
but soon he grows weary and is overcome by an intense moral conflict.
Should he remain on Venusburg where his every wish and desire for pleasure is fulfilled,
or should he renounce this passive independent life and once again embrace meaningful struggle
in the world. After agonizing deliberation, Tannhäuser decides to leave
I must return to the world of men. I stand prepared for battle, even for
death and nothingness.” Commenting on this myth, David Gilmour writes,
“…the knight has mastered the most primitive of the demands of the pleasure principle,
the temptation to drown in the arms of an omnipotent woman, to withdraw into a
puerile cocoon of pleasure and safety.” In the next video in this series, we are
We’re going to examine in more detail what the heroic attitude entails, and how we can cultivate it to escape psychological regression.
By exploring how cultures across the world conceive manhood, we will construct a map of heroic manhood we can use in our quest to mature beyond the limiting confines of boy psychology.
As we do, we will also learn why the claim that masculinity is toxic is not only misguided, but dangerous.
For manhood is not a tool of oppression
It is rather a cultural construct intended to promote the psychological development of boys into men
capable of supporting the security and prosperity of a society when the ideals of manhood are lost or distorted a
society becomes prone to dissolution at the hands of internal and external threats as
The often quoted saying by Michael Hopp puts it weak men create hard times or as David Gilmour summarizes
Real men are expected to tame nature in order to recreate and bolster the basic kinship units of their society.
That is, to reinvent and perpetuate the social order by will, to create something of value from nothing.
Manhood is a kind of male procreation. Its heroic quality lies in its self-direction and discipline.
Its absolute self-reliance, in a word, its agential autonomy.
Source: Academy of Ideas