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Chapter 6

The Age of the Father

A boy is hardwired to become a man. He is hardwired to be initiated. Yet his hardwiring is dependent on the actions of other men. His hardwiring is dependent on a network of older men. If a boy is kept from men who will guide him to manhood, his destiny is blocked. Other men must consciously turn on the hardware.

It is a misunderstanding that most men languish in the world of the mother because of the need for comfort. This is not the real story. Most men are stuck in the world of the mother because other men have not taken them away. The most important happening for the young boy in his quest for manhood is the emergence of one man, a good father. This man then becomes a bridge to other men who hold a key to his destiny. The father brings the energy of separation, the mirror of masculinity, and the motivation to search for the life mission. The father starts a man on his road to manhood.

The connection to a mother object means overstaying in the world of the feminine. A man who stays too long sees the world through the eyes of a woman. He often finds himself living out the dreams and wishes of a woman. Sometimes he stays with a woman whose dreams he despises. In either case, he finds himself spending most of his energy obsessed with keeping her happy. He lives the dark side of the saying, "If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy." He assumes that if he pleases a mother object, he will somehow be happy too.

Indigenous people instinctively knew this feminine obsession to be wrong for the boy and destructive to the community. Both men and women did not let it continue. Mothers, poignantly but purposefully, handed their boys over to fathers and elders. They knew it was time. Fathers, then elders, knew their role and willingly took over responsibility for the boy's growth.

Modern men do not benefit from this wisdom. Most modern men are stuck in the world of the feminine. In modern times the mother has been blamed for this overstaying situation. Men, even today, are thought to be victims of devouring, controlling mothers, helpless to get away. Early psychology blamed everything from masturbation, to addictions, to homosexuality on the smothering mother. Blaming women has historically been the civilized way for men to succumb to the mother complex, while trying to save face. It is easy to blame the woman, not the complex.

The fact is that modern young men are stuck in the world of the feminine because older men leave them there. The dark mother merely colludes in the process. The dark mother merely seduces an already lost boy. In any case it is not the flesh and blood mother, or mother/wife, who is the culprit here. She is most often the scapegoat.

Separation and initiation always involves an older man. An indigenous boy never left the village by himself. He didn't know where to go or what to do. He was stuck until an older man came and took him away. In modern times young men still need older to show them the way. The father is the first older man the boy connects with. His presence and wisdom is crucial to a boy's growth.

Assistant Mothers

In the recent past fathers were, at most, considered assistant mothers. Margaret Mead, a noted anthropologist, once quipped that fathers were a "biological necessity but a social accident". Since Victorian times and the advent of the Industrial Revolution, in the early 1800's, fathers were felt to be doing their parental duty if they provided a financial base for the family and stepped in when discipline was too much for the mother. Otherwise parenting was left to the mother, including the teaching of morality and social graces.

Modern American fathers were taught that they were not needed in childrearing. Anthony Rotundo, in his fascinating book called American Manhood, writes, "In the new society that developed early in the nineteenth century, fathers declined in their importance to sons, and their place was taken by mothers." So fathers unknowingly deserted their sons, stranding them in the mother's world with no way out.

Much of the literature of the contemporary men's movement centers around the lack of good fathering in the lives of their sons. Robert Bly was the first to point out the woundedness that many men feel from lack of fathering. He talks of the changing role of fathers since the Industrial Revolution when fathers no longer worked side by side with their sons. With the coming of technology and the moving of the workplace to the factory, the father became an absent member of the family. Factories replaced fields. Sons saw their father off early in the morning, greeting an exhausted man late in the evening. A son knew little of what his father did all day, where previously, in agricultural societies, fathers taught their sons what they did. Fathers were no longer in the loop of initiating their sons. As Rotundo says, "mothers were now expected to mold the characters of their sons, a task that in previous generations had always belonged to fathers." Sons were abandoned to be initiated by their mothers.

Today, the lack of a healthy father presence has become the most significant cause of a boy's loss of masculine direction. We are all products of stunted or skewed initiations because our fathers didn't know better. We are all often at a loss about how to father our own sons. We are all terribly at risk for seduction by the dark mother. We are all at a loss for what it means to be a man from the inside out. This is what Bly talks about when he emphasizes every man's father wound.

Masculine Energy

But what is the role of the father in a boy's initiation? How have we been wounded by his absence? Where does he lead us? Where is he today?

The father for indigenous people is the son's first significant experience with masculine energy. When the father is present with positive masculine energy he starts the process of separating the boy from mother passivity and moving the boy toward an active state of motivation for his search for masculinity. By doing this he performs a mini-initiation for the boy, awakening a hunger for emotional risk and exploratory pain.

As we shall see, a significant part of masculine energy is the energy of separation and individuation, which inevitably involves pain. Masculine energy involves facing the pain of separation from the tragic world of addiction and regressive relationships. The father is the first, necessary bearer of this separating energy, while giving the boy a vision of wholeness beyond the pain. He gives meaning to boundary setting and is a model of a mature, boundaried man.

In indigenous tribes the father took over the guidance and discipline of the child after a point, usually 7 or 8, and started to introduce him to the man's world. He gave him the message that now he would have to experience pain and discomfort on his way to getting his needs and the tribe's needs met. This pain was not seen as the enemy, as in the mother's world, but as a necessary part of manhood.

The initial pain was separation from the mother and the world of immediate and easy gratification. The father started to teach delayed gratification for a purpose more important than comfort. The father taught the boy how to face the world outside the hut. He introduced the boy to his world, the world of the marketplace, the world of the hunt, and the world of the survival of the tribe. The survival skills that the father would teach, as well as the modeling of manhood, would be necessary for the boy to survive his coming initiatory ordeal. The father would guide the boy in starting to see the world through a man's eyes.

The Initiated Father

It seems that the crucial time the father needs to assert his positive masculine energy in a modern context is still when the boy turns 7 or 8. About this time the boy is starting to confront the world outside the hearth and hut, symbolized by venturing to a modern school. The boy learns that there is a world outside the hut that he is destined for. He learns that this new world has different rules from the world he came from.

As William Jarema says in his book, Fathering the Next Generation, the father represents the strange, outside world to his son. If the father has been initiated he will very consciously take the boy away from the feminine hut, the kitchen and family room, and tell the mother he is taking over the next step in the boy's growth. He will then introduce his son to the world of the marketplace, the world of strangers outside of family, to the social world outside the home. In this way the father is a crucial transitional figure on the boy's road to initiation. He starts teaching a boy how a man acts with strangers. He starts to teach a boy the rules of the world of men.

The father, not the mother, should start setting the rules and the discipline at this age. An initiated mother will understand this and welcome it. She will not get in the way of the father's influence or try to protect the boy from the father's strength. She will start to go through her own grieving process at this point in letting go of her son. This will be part of her initiation.

The father teaches a boy how to interact in the larger society. The initiated father will see this world as an exciting, adventuresome place. He teaches a boy that strangers are potential friends. In this he builds on the message of the good mother, who has given the boy a sense of hope and trust. He also gives a boy the beginning of a comfort level around other men. In this way a father teaches a boy he can reach out to other men and follow his hardwired instincts. An initiated father will not see other men as competitors and dangerous strangers but as sources of support and wisdom. He will see other men as potential fellow journeyors, as 'brothers' in initiation, or elders who can give wisdom and direction. He will impart to his son the goodness of the community of men.

The initiated father starts to teach a boy the wisdom of the elder. He will teach that there is necessary pain in growth. The world of the father shows a boy that anything of value needs to be struggled for. And the father starts to show that value resides within. The father does not shield a son from pain, especially emotional pain. Instead he acknowledges the pain and encourages the boy to learn from it. In this he prepares the boy for his eventual ordeal.

The initiated father teaches a son how a man relates to a woman without turning her into mother. In this way a father gives important lessons about committed, adult relationships. An initiated father will not treat his wife as a mother object. He will model healthy boundaries. He will not be terrified of her anger or dependent on her approval. Thus, he will give a son the example of how to treat a woman with respect, as a companion and true partner. He will also give a son the wisdom to choose a woman who can be a true partner.

In all that he teaches, a father lends his son his own strength and wisdom until the son is strong enough to find his own inner wisdom. As Lewis Yablonsky, author of Fathers And Sons, points out, "A son who has a close relationship with his father is thus constantly examining his own behavior from his father's point of view." An unfathered boy will soon be overwhelmed by the choices and responsibilities of his new world away from home. He can then turn into an overwhelmed man who does not have the strength or enthusiasm for an adult life. An initiated father lends the strength for the boy to make good decisions and the strength for the boy to weather his mistakes. This experience gives a boy confidence that he will eventually succeed in a man's world.

The father is the first and most important model of manhood that a son encounters. A son will carry the imprint of his father in his soul, for better or worse, for the rest of his life. The ideal is for a son to want to live his life with the passion and dedication of his initiated father. The ideal is to see his life as filled with potential for opportunity and meaning, in community with other men and women who share that optimism and hope. The initiated father opens a son up to the camaraderie of brothers, the wisdom of elders, and the companionship of a committed life partner.

William Jarema outlines several types of positive fathers. He talks of the Champion Father who prepares a son for initiation by desiring what is best for his son, championing him by his support, and helping him to excel as a unique individual. He talks of the Mystic Father who gives his son a feel for the sacred wilderness, inside himself and in nature, and the beauty and mystery of human life. He talks of the Mentor Father who gives his son the wisdom of his worldly experience in the marketplace and the world of men. All of these fathers teach by example as well as words. All have found a strength that can only come from completing their own ordeal.

The Modern Age of the Father

The modern man ideally needs a father between the ages of 7-14, as did primitive boys. However, modern men seem to have the boy's need for emotional fathering for a much longer time. I see most men's need for fathering extending past age 14 to around age 36. We all probably need good fathering at least until our mid-30's. Because we are an elderless society, a society without formal initiation, a man's initiation now is left to chance, if he gets it at all. If this were an initiated, mature culture boys would have the opportunity to mature much faster. However, in a modern or uninitiated culture, it seems to take a man at least until his mid-30's to find a sufficient amount of healthy fathering energy to move into psychospiritual initiation. Otherwise, as Frank Pittman points out, men will "go through their puberty rituals day after day for a lifetime, waiting for a father to anoint them and say 'Attaboy,' to treat them as good enough to be considered a man."

This extra stage roughly corresponds to psychologist Daniel Levinson's developmental stage of neo-adulthood. Levinson studied a cohort of men from their days at Harvard in the 1940's throughout their life cycles. He used his study to find if men go through developmental stages their whole life. While older psychological theories seemed to show development stopping at young adulthood, Levinson was one of the first modern psychologists to show that men develop throughout their lives. Levinson showed that adulthood was not a monolithic end state culminating in death. Instead he showed that that men could keep growing past their 20's.

Levinson feels there is a normal structure to most men's lives throughout their lifespan. He claims in his book, The Seasons Of A Man's Life, that men are not considered full adults in our society until around 35. Until then he is a 'novice" adult.' After that he is ready to become a 'full-fledged' adult. A man has a great need for a mentor during his novice phase, according to Levinson, in order to make the transition to full adulthood. A mentor can make up for a lot of missed fathering, as I will talk about later.

Carl Jung also talks of a man being able to start the equivalent of the initiatory process only after 35. His idea of maturity and initiation he called individuation. He felt that a man was not ready for his journey of individuation until much later than adolescence. He felt a man was not ready until the second half, or 'afternoon', of his life.

Jed Diamond, in his book Male Menopause, talks of male menopause, with its physical and psychological consequences, as a passage to the second half of a man's life. This second half, or second mountain to climb, is the time a man finds much of his true purpose and passion in life. This 'Menopause Passage' sounds very similar to psychological initiation. According to Diamond, this time starts for most men at age forty, but sometimes as early as age 35.

J.R. Tolkein wrote a series of books on a fantasy world complete with long histories of many cultures, multiple languages, and mystical geographies. He wrote a myth. Like other myths I talk about, his story contains many psychological truths. The hero of his story is a relatively young hobbit, a boy trying to become a man. The hobbit culture has different stages of hobbit social development. There is a hobbit term called the tweens, a time between hobbit childhood and adulthood that extended from 18 to 36. Hobbits weren't considered adults until 36, after their tweens. J.R. Tolkein also seemed to sense modern man's dilemma of psychological growth in giving hobbits an extended adolescence. Or maybe he sensed modern man's desire for more time to prepare for adulthood.

Contradicting our social norms, the 20's is still the age of the father. The father figure is still needed during the age of the tweens. For many men their own father is exhausted by this time, as Robert Bly reminds us. However, some fathers come into their own when a son reaches this age, especially if they have just completed their own initiation. For others there is the hope of a second father whom I will talk about in a forthcoming chapter.

The Father Wound

If the father is absent, or bears negative masculine energy, two things may happen. The boy may be frightened to advance, retreating back to the mother. Then he tries to live out his mother's dreams and obsessively tries to please the woman he loves. Or the boy unites with the negative, competitive father, a process called identifying with the aggressor. Then he lives out his father's dreams or the dreams of the patriarchal society he is a part of. In neither case does he find his own manhood.

The 20's is the age where the father wound first appears for men. I have counseled many men in their 20's who are stuck in their tweens because of their father wound. They feel this great social responsibility to be an adult, yet see little in the adulthood model of their father that appeals to them. So they wander in this limbo of overwhelming expectation and little motivation. They fall prey to the passivity of the dark mother. Adulthood to them is not an adventure, but more like a disease. They cannot identify with their father's life yet they are hardwired to follow a father. So they stay a teen in a man's body, ashamed and scared and in need of a father figure who can give them a different vision of male adulthood.

There are other men in their 20's who are identified with a remote, successful, uninitiated father. They want to follow their father's lead. They have learned to identify with a flawed vision of manhood. They usually don't feel their father wound until later in their life. I do not see these men in their 20's. They are too busy living out their father's dream. Their father wound appears at mid-life, when they glimpse the dead-end road they are on.

The Traditional Father

If a father is not initiated he may not see the need in his son for masculine energy. Or he may use his son to try to get the masculine energy he never got. An uninitiated father is usually either absent from his son's life, or he is competitive with his son for a sense of lost manhood. He will, by a variety of unconscious ways, leave a boy stuck in the mother's world with no power or insight to get out.

Absent fathers most often are playing out their assigned roles in a traditional way, using the traditional manual. We talked of the traditional role of father as family protector and provider. This is the role Warren Farrell describes in his model of a Stage I marriage. Stage One marriages are survival focused and men are responsible for the economic survival of their family. There is no need for the father in childraising, except in matters of extreme discipline. That traditional father mission concentrates on the financial well-being of the family, and depends on the father being a remote model of responsibility, industry, and ambition. In many ways the traditional family is seen as an economic unit whose goal is to raise sons to head their own economic units.

As we will see in a coming chapter the father's worth has become equated to his net worth, leading to work addiction as the norm. As in Victorian times the worth of the whole family, especially sons, is also attached to the father's net worth. Warren Farrel talks of men substituting the quest for money for the quest of the inner life. Work success has become the father's test of manhood, his initiatory ordeal. For the modern father the most important role of guiding his son through the perils of his mother separation and inner initiation was lost. The traditional father was unaware it was ever there. As Anthony Rotundo says, "By the early nineteenth century, when the work of middle class men began to pull fathers away from home, fathers yielded their traditional roles of shaping the character of their sons."

I have talked to many men who couldn't understand why their wife left them, or why their children left with their wife. They believed they were following the guidelines of fatherhood. Invariably they would talk of how well they provided financially for their family. The most repeated comment would go, "I gave them everything they asked for." They knew they had done everything by the book. They had.

I have also talked to many men who have felt love and pity for their father. These men knew their fathers would do whatever they could for them. They loved their fathers for that. They also realized that their fathers did not have what they needed to keep from feeling overwhelmed in their quest for respectability for their families and themselves.

Creating a Father

An uninitiated, traditional father will ignore his son because he is in pursuit of patriarchal masculinity. He does not know better. Yet he unknowingly abandons his son, withholding the needed masculine energy. Because of the boy's hardwired need for the masculine, he will go elsewhere, randomly picking up bits and pieces of masculine stuff from his environment. He will imagine what being manly is. He will create a montage of masculinity as his model, like a lifeless poster hung on the wall in his bedroom. In the words of Frank Pittman, "Without a 'father in residence', we may go through life striving toward an ideal of exaggerated, even toxic, masculinity",

The uninitiated son of an absent father will imagine what a good father is. He will long to have this imagined father as an answer to the emptiness he feels inside. He will also long for this masculine figure to bring him along the way to manhood. He finds that the bits and pieces of masculine energy he picks up from older men is not enough to fill his void or guide him on his way. He will ceaselessly look for other answers.

Many times this answer will translate into a young man's desire to become a good father himself. Some men try to get a good father by being a good father. They unconsciously try to create the family they never had. They eventually become both father and son. Thus, they try to achieve manhood through their family and their fathering.

These men, though following a traditional path, have added a new twist to the modern father's role. This baby boom twist is often a wonderful benefit to their children, especially their sons. These modern fathers are changing the traditional Victorian role by putting a lot of effort into childraising and a lot of love into their children. They are getting close to their children. They seem to be drawing on some deeper archetypal father energy in getting closer to their children. They are also drawing on the best parts of their own fathers' lives. More importantly, they are learning from their own pain of growing up.

This new form of involved fatherhood is a crucial cultural addition. Many modern fathers need both support and praise for this fathering work. Though there is a ways to go, these fathers are giving significantly more masculine energy, especially to their sons. They are also giving their daughters a good foundation of self-esteem and self-confidence. They are good fathers.

In the process these men are also unconsciously providing some healthy fathering energy for the boy inside themselves. This is a form of second fathering that is more and more prevalent in today's world. It can bring a man farther along his path than the traditional father can. These men have a closer tie to childhood as well as their own sons. They give their boy inside some exposure to the fathering they didn't have.

Unfortunately these fathers give much more to their sons than they are able to give to their boy inside. Their own father emptiness is still not filled. This emptiness most often comes out in the lack of a healthy, passionate relationship with a wife, who still is more of a mother. It also comes out in the confusion these fathers feel when their own sons become adolescents and need help in career choice and life direction.

Mack

Mack grew up the youngest boy in a large family, with a father who was gruff, opinionated, hard working, and traditionally absent because of a blue collar job. Mack learned to work hard and to have high standards, as his father did. Mack's father taught him to be in the "99th percentile of competitiveness." Mack identified with his father and idolized him. Mack also knew he was his father's favorite, which made much of Mack's childhood a happy time.

Unfortunately, Mack's father died when Mack was 14. Mack's siblings were older and out of the house. He was stuck with a mother who thought of him as her least favorite, and who was exhausted by life and grief. As often happens, Mack's fragile mother started looking to Mack for support, as well as for the manliness his father provided to the family. Mack was not ready to be the emotional head of the household and take his father's place. This was too much responsibility much too early.

Emotionally, Mack was stuck. All he knew of manhood, through his father, was to work hard, both at home and on the job, and provide for the family. Mack honored his father by becoming very responsible for his mother, his younger sister, and their house. By doing so he had to skip the whole stage of healthy adolescence, the tweens. Like many men in our society, he felt forced to become a man before his time. He had no older men who cared enough to help him prepare for his manhood or help him shoulder responsibility.

His detour was more exaggerated than most. It kept him from dating and experimenting with friendship and vocation. Mack put himself through college with high marks, while holding jobs and living at home. He then got married in his early twenties, shortly after his mother died.

Freed of one huge responsibility he knew only one way to be a man. He took on more responsibilities. This was his father's map of manhood. He and his wife started having children immediately. Mack continued to need a father, so he became a father right away. He worked hard to provide for his children. He put all his energy into his career and the financial success it brought. This was the way he knew to love his children. He knew no other way of being a man.

Mack was well on his way to becoming a work addicted father and provider when, at age 32, he lost his executive position because of company politics. He was devastated. He went into a serious depression. He suffered a humiliating separation. The separation was from the father, the father that he thought he was to his family and the father his own father expected him to be. He was involuntarily separated from what he and his patriarchal culture expected him to be. He was thrust into the necessary father separation too early and too unprepared. He was thrown, unguided, into the confusing, terrifying initiatory ordeal. He didn't realize that most of his depression was the initiatory depression following separation. Instead he saw himself as a failure in his own eyes, which were the eyes of his father.

The necessary father separation happened without preparation for the ordeal ahead. In this crisis, he desperately started to reach out to other men for advice and counsel. Men who have absent fathers find this much easier to do than men who have competitive fathers. Mack found enough strength to come to counseling. He needed a second father, then an elder, to prepare him for this ordeal and guide him through it. Mack's own fathering was an unfinished bridge to his manhood. His father gave him good market skills such as focus, a good work ethic, and high quality standards. His father taught him that the product was worth some pain. Mack's own efforts at being a good father had built more of that bridge. However, he needed more fathering to prepare him for his next steps.

Mack had enough trust in fathering to reach out to other men, including a counselor who could talk to him about father wounds and father healing. Mack started to understand he needed more healthy fathering to help him sort out his role as father and husband. He needed to experience alternative ways of being masculine, other than his father's way. He also needed fathering to restore his confidence in his abilities in the professional world. Down the line he also came to understand he needed eldering to help him reevaluate his life direction.

In his depression Mack had started paying more attention to his children and less to his career. Mack became an attentive father to his children, not leaving them like he was left. He tried to make them feel special, as special as he felt when he was a child. He came to understand that he was unconsciously trying to get fathering by being a loving father. He was understanding his children's need in his own pain. He started to realize that, in his own need for acceptance, he was also feeling his children's need. His involvement with his children taught him that love was more than providing an impersonal standard. He learned that children need a father close, so they can feel his care and experience his personal guidance.

The emphasis, today, on men becoming more active in the lives of their children is a hopeful movement both from the view of the children as well as the man. A society that starts to value a father's role in childraising will begin to make the positive father archetype available to all its sons. Hopefully, more and more men will see the importance of fathering young men regardless of relationship. In the process they will realize their own need for the answers to manhood, beyond the patriarchal ones.

The Competitive Father

Much of the men's movement talks of the absent father, away at work or reading the paper. This father has little to say to his son and is a mystery to his family. However there is a whole other class of father that is more involved with his son, but in a dark, negative way. This uninitiated father competes with his son. As we will see, the patriarchy is based on this competitive father, using his son for his own needs. Yet many men are also personally affected by their own competitive father in ways that block their journey to manhood.

Competition between father and son is as old as Greek myths and as new as Freudian psychology. In her book, Gods in Everyman, Jean Shinoda Bolen points out how ancient myths have a relevance to men's lives today. She, like Joseph Campbell and other mythologists, emphasizes the fact that cultural myths contain a great deal of psychological truth. In her book she shows how myth tells us a great deal about the archetypes that modern men enact every day.

Bolen feels that Greek mythology contains most of the psychological foundations for Western civilization. As she says, "I think of Greek mythology as going back to a time that was equivalent to the childhood of our civilization." And Greek myth starts with father competition.

Uranus, the first god and father, was the sky god. Gaia, the first mother, was the earth goddess. They mated and gave issue to the Titans. As Gaia then continued to give birth, Uranus became jealous of Gaia because of the children she continued to bear. Uranus started kidnapping and hiding Gaia's children and would not let them see the light of day.

Gaia was devastated. She turned to her grown sons, the Titans, for help. However they were paralyzed by fear of their father. Only Cronus, the youngest Titan, agreed to help. Cronus and Gaia conspired to emasculate Uranus and free the earth's children. They succeeded in overthrowing Uranus and castrating him. Bolen states that it was "Uranus' violence against his children (that was) the initial evil." Father competition and the need for patriarchal control came to spawn the violence of the world. Uranus was the first perpetrator as well as the first victim.

Cronus then became the patriarchal god. However, Cronus was forewarned that he was destined to be overcome by his own son. Cronus determined that this would not happen. He followed his dark father's script. He swallowed each of his children after birth, not even bothering to see if the child was a son or daughter. And the competition continued.

Zeus was one of Cronus' sons who was able to escape being eaten by the help of another goddess. He ultimately overthrew Cronus and the rest of the Titans to become supreme god himself. As Bolen says, "Violence had begotten violence for three generations."

There is also another Greek myth that relates to father competition. Freud was the pioneer psychologist who talked of the Oedipal struggle for a young boy. This psychological struggle was based on the myth of Oedipus, who eventually and unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Freud stated that a son would naturally come in competition with his father for his mother's attention. If a son did not give up this need to have his mother to himself he would run up against an angry, powerful father. Since a boy was much smaller and more vulnerable than his father, the wise and healthy son, according to Freud, would give up his mother need and align with his father. He would then identify with his father's dreams and desires. In this way a son would avoid being destroyed by the competitive father.

In Freud's view this alliance with father, through fear, was a good thing, since it bolstered the patriarchal culture of obedience to the fathers. As we will see, identifying with the aggressive, competitive father, without separation, is not necessarily a good thing.

Many men have a difficult time, as Uranus and Tim did, at the birth of their first child. The attention, nurturing and concern that they had gotten from a mother object suddenly leaves as the mother turns her attention to the infant. The husband turned father can find himself feeling abandoned and jealous. Unless the father is initiated he will see a son as a competitor. Resentment builds toward the infant, a resentment which can go on throughout that child's life. The son of a competitive father can feel that resentment in the form of competitive criticism and demeaning behavior. Demeaning behavior can turn into emotional and physical abuse. The father can feel that he can find manhood by vanquishing his son. In this way he thinks he can win back the mother.

This abuse cycle is probably the most wounding a son can experience. However, there is a way out of this cycle for the son and the competitive father. It is Freud's answer. But the price is great. In the competition the son can let the father win. Any success the son does get he offers up to his father. Unconsciously, the son honors his father by honoring his father's dreams. The son lives his life for his father. In this way the father is not threatened and the son feels safe. The son identifies with the competitive father and seeks manhood through that model. In this way the son also feels close to his father. In effect the competitive father uses the son to live his own dream and to make himself look like a man. The father can get a sense of pseudo-manhood by feeling responsible for his son's success. In turn the son will identify with his father and his father's dreams as the only way he knows to get the fathering he needs and a feeling of manhood.

Most sons of competitive fathers will be extremely focused and motivated. They will be driven. Their focus will be hard on money, status, or whatever constitutes the father's dreams. They will be unconsciously living the father's script. They will not have taken time in their lives to have considered their own dreams.

If a boy does not succeed in living his father's dreams, the father may put him down unmercifully, punishing him for frustrating his father. This is the son who is driven back to the mother object, usually in the form of an addiction. He is the man who gives up. For he has only one ideal, and that is unreachable. He has only one road to manhood, a road he cannot negotiate.

However, if the son succeeds in his father's dreams both can reach their goal. The father feels successful, and the son feels secure in a ready made identity. Loyalty to a father is not a bad thing, but after a certain point there is a high price. The price the son pays is the relinquishment of his own vision and the path to his own identity. He lives someone else's identity. He is the one who, at mid-life, most profoundly feels the "failure of success". He is the one who gets stuck in his father's world, never able to separate and find his own manhood through his own ordeal. For the competitive father never lets go.

Don's Father

Don was an airplane pilot. His father was a successful corporate executive. His mother was a woman with little motherly instincts and a need for recognition and attention. She had a great need for her family to be seen as a traditional, happy one. She also had a great investment in Don's success, since that would prove they were a successful family.

Don's father was absent a lot from his son's life, though he was home with the family when not working. His father's world seemed to revolve around Don's mother. His father was alternately arguing with his wife and boosting her ego. He had little attention left over for Don. Don remembers his boyhood years as lonely, because his father and mother spent much of their time with his younger sister or with each other. Don talked of some "mystical power" his mother had over his dad, keeping him close to her and away from Don. Don felt the power over himself, too.

Don's father always wanted to be a pilot, a dream he never realized. This wish was probably one way of symbolizing his need to leave the mother object and try his initiatory ordeal. Don also found himself wanting to be a pilot, partly to honor his father's dream, partly to get more of the fathering he needed.

Don identified with his father's corporate success as well as his dreams of being a pilot. He was able to get into the Air Force and become the pilot he always wanted to be. However, Don's dreams didn't turn out as expected. He got no closer to his father. In fact, his father seemed less interested in his success the more his mother showed her adulation.

Graduation from pilot training symbolized his family life. His mother didn't come because of illness. The illness must have been real because Don was the hero of the family and this was the family's triumph. His father didn't come, presumably to take care of his mother. In fact, his father hardly showed any notice of Don's considerable accomplishment. It seems his father couldn't accept his son's success, as a Champion Father would. Neither could his father leave his mother object to acknowledge his biggest competitor.

Don became a successful corporate man, flying for a major airline. He married and had three children. At age 38, he came to counseling. He was finding it hard as a copilot to bond with the captains of his airplanes. He found himself irritable and competitive with them. He also found himself very angry when they became competitive with him. This made his work life very uncomfortable much of the time.

In his work he also found himself unable to connect with other men in the company. He tended to be either aloof or distrustful of their friendships. He didn't know how to trust other men, though he was a man who could be trusted. He found himself uncomfortable in their presence, yet wanting their friendship.

Don's father wounds came out in his problems with bonding with other men, a typical response from men with competitive fathers. His father wounds kept him from connecting with brothers who could be male friends and allies. He was again feeling the desolation of his childhood, even though he had a family who loved him. He was the empty hero. He felt successful and alone. It took him a long time to trust me as a counselor and second father, in order to start healing his father wounds and separate from the world view his father gave him.

The Sins of the Father

If a father is not initiated, he provides a son with a faulty model of adulthood. All our fathers have unknowingly colluded in creating our faulty training manuals. This fault is the origin of the father wound. We are all heirs of this wound, passed on from father to son for many generations. The wound acts like an original sin that is born in our souls as the body emerges from conception. This wound can go down many generations.

I have worked with many men who have struggled with the wounds from their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Often they live what seems their personal tragedy, when it is really the family tragedy of many generations. Sons wrestle with the same demons of their ancestors without realizing the root of their struggle. Most of us have been wounded by fathers who, in turn, have been wounded by their fathers. Most of our fathers were well-meaning but naive. Some were desperate and competitive.

In fact the vast majority of fathers have done whatever they could to be the best their sons and daughters needed. Most fathers have knocked themselves out for their families. They have used their masculine energy in the only way they knew how. This is the sadness and sense of tragedy that most men have to face on their initiatory journey. There are no bad guys here. Yet the wound exists. And facing the pain of the father wound is a crucial step on the journey toward manhood. Love and truth can exist side by side. Awareness of our own father wound can help each if us understand our father's father wound. Seeing one's father as also a brother in pain and ignorance can lead to compassion. When a man can see his father as also a brother he is well on his way to healing his father wound.

Even with much love for our fathers, many of us saw our father's lives as unhappy and wanted none of it, losing masculine energy in the process. We ceased to look to our father for his strength. In fact we feared we would end up living a life like his. Some of us have wanted to live our father's lives, only to find that life somehow empty. We thought our fathers had the answers, only to find they felt as empty as us.

Most of our fathers have been absent fathers, absent in ways we needed. Yet we all have an urgent need for father energy. The road to manhood goes through a father. In the absence of our own father's good energy we have learned to take up pieces of masculine energy from places beyond our family. Our hardwired need eventually forces most men to identify with the masculine energy emanating from the father culture around us. In a sense we have all been forced to identify with this competitive father, that is the patriarchy. We look to the patriarchy to initiate us. If we don't identify with the patriarchy we risk not being considered men by family, friends, society. When we do identify we become competitive, or a failure.

In this culture there is little idea of the need for fathering other than patriarchal fathering. And there is no thought of a step beyond the patriarchy, no thought of father separation. So men get stuck in the village with divided loyalties, loyal to a mother object at home and to a patriarchy in the marketplace. Neither of these loyalties gives him the direction he needs. Neither parent figure points to a reality beyond the village. The next chapter talks of how we are all forced into pseudo-initiation by a patriarchal society, in the absence of a healthy, initiated father culture.

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All chapters of Toward Manhood are archived.

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