ONCE WERE CHILDREN
For males in many indigenous
societies what is known as the ‘a rite of passage’ into manhood has the effect
of cutting a youth off from his younger self, dissociating him from his
childhood – it is a ceremony that is painful and traumatic and felt to be
necessary for the boy to become a man. Among
the Luiseño Indians, a boy has to ‘undergo severe ordeals such as laying on red
ant mounds and not crying out from pain as they are repeatedly bitten over long
periods of time. Among some Australian
Aborigine societies, a boy being initiated was expected to repeatedly hit his
penis with a heavy rock until it was bruised and bloody. He also had several of his incisor teeth
knocked out with a sharp rock by the adult men who were instructing him in the
duties and obligations of manhood and the secrets of their religion.’
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As I said, purpose of these barbaric
rituals is to dissociate the boy from childhood. In some aboriginal societies
this is accomplished with such effectiveness that a boy will walk past his
mother and ignore her. He is now a man, not a boy. She simply doesn’t exist any
longer as his mother.
In western society a man’s break with
childhood isn’t as complete as this. Over the decades things have slowly
changed. ‘Macho’ is now a derogatory
label; but there lingers the powerful ghost of the old primitive image of what
it is to be ‘a man’: a tough, fearless warrior, indifferent to pain and
physical injury.
In our country the aggressive ‘rugby
culture’, energised by our Maori people, has an enormous grip on the male
psyche. Its Anglo-Saxon roots can be traced back to the bullying practices of
the English Public Schools where men were trained in sports and the cool ruthlessness
necessary to run the British Empire. There
are still the remnants of this traditional mindset even in the gentlest of
nappy-changing New Age fathers. Powerful emotions can be switched on in front
of TV sports programs, triggering a rush of war-like adrenaline. The primitive
warrior loiters in the unconscious at the ready, like an archetypal savage. It has
allied itself with the warrior nostalgia of the Maori with which the New
Zealand sense of national identity has become conflated.
But the repressed child does not go
away and for many men it unconsciously reemerges in the family situation, where
the man, now a father, is emotionally tethered to the wife as his mother, without
his in the least realising it – a situation he would vehemently deny and only
becomes openly manifest when there is the threat that he may lose her.
It is strange, isn’t it, that the
very emphasis on manhood produces men who are psychologically fixated in
childhood. The internal child is repressed and with it the vital connection
with the original self. Masculine bravado tries to compensate for this loss,
sometimes going to enormous lengths to prove his mastery. Such men show all the
outward signs of strength and competence, and indeed do posses these qualities
in war, sport and the creative struggle for survival – but the price is an unconscious
regressive streak that is weak and immature. The plus side, the pay-off, is the
sense of power and the freedom from the pull of the feminine.
Women are not subject to requirements
that so severely cut them off from childhood and, because of this, and for
other reasons too, women retain a more wholesome connection with their original
self and are thus, on the whole, more psychologically skillful and mature.
The history of western society has
been that of the ‘dominator style’, a man’s world – deeply cut off from nature.
We are beginning to see the devastating consequences of this mindset. We have bullied and raped the natural world
and are now beginning to pay for it; and the life of a single man will also
eventually reap the desolation of being detached, discovering that power and
self-mastery are ultimately self-defeating.
To accomplish the rite of passage
into ‘manhood’ the past has to be rewritten to fit the myth. A man’s fictional
history becomes that of the warrior, ten feet tall, strong as an ox and who,
like Heracles, Theseus and Odysseus can defy even the gods. The self made man. To
make the fiction true a man has to accomplish masterful deeds. Our violent
history has been littered with madmen like Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler, the results of whose great deeds we
know all too well.
If we look
at our small New Zealand society we can see that this myth of manhood is not
distributed evenly across the boards. It is culturally determined, but
variations run in families. The hyper-masculine mindset, its particular style
and strength, is handed down from one generation to the next. A style can persist
in the family atmosphere across the generations without ever being explicitly
stated – unconsciously endemic in the family ethos. And because it is never
even thought about its hold on the soul is tenacious.
As a
psychotherapist I have seen how much difficulty some men have with this
affliction: the instinctive terror of weakness, uncertainty or vacillation: and
there is a sort of pall of guilt hanging over it all, where any admission of
childlike feelings is absolutely inadmissible. It is a terrible burden to
carry. They struggle with what they are supposed to be.
We must
understand that the macho archetype, if we can call it that, is not simply genetic,
but rather epigenetic. This means that the genes involved can
be switched on or off by environmental and cultural factors. Nobody chooses the
kind of culture they are born into. But it is culture that greatly determines what
we become. Cultures change slowly. Not as slowly as biological evolution, but
change it does.
The way we
each struggle with our culture is how we help create the future. It’s the
difference between what we have been dealt with and what kind of deal we hand
on.
contact:
stanrich@vodafone.co.nz
(03) 981 2264
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