I Want, Therefore I am in Danger of Not Being
The overarching thesis of my talk today is that men have a difficult time admitting their want of love. Want is a funny word. You might already have noticed it in the way I just used it “admitting one’s want of love.” Commonly we think of wanting something as a way of expressing quite strongly and willfully that we would like to have something. But wanting something can also be used to point to what is lacking like in the sentence “your work is wanting.” So, when I talk about men wanting love I am not only saying that they willfully demand it. I am also saying that they are desperately wanting it, meaning missing it, lacking it and, therefore, looking for it.
The problem with wanting is that when it occurs in a project, an essay or a person we think of it as a flaw. When something is wanting we’re not simply pointing to something that needs to be corrected, something that could be easily adjusted. “wanting” means that something in the most fundamental sense is missing. Without that which is missing, i.e., if the wanting is on-going the thing that is wanting is incomplete, insufficient and, ultimately, not viable.
In other words, using the term “want” in the title of my essay today is implying that we can substitute for it the word “flawed”. Then, the title reads “can I admit the flaw of needing to be loved.” For a man to admit to his wanting love is to admit to a fundamental incompleteness in himself. It is so fundamental that, without it, he is not fully himself. He is limping, on crutches. He is handicapped.
To be sure, though, this admission is more than the average male vulnerability we have talked about in previous lectures. The admission that he needs to be loved is not simply a confession of softness and, perhaps, temporary weakness. Rather, this admission is a straight forward admission of shame. Wanting to be loved, wholly and in our entirety, wanting not to be dismissed or sent away to calm our pain and help ourselves is to say I am shameful. For a heterosexual man the shame of wanting to be loved is at about the same level as is the confession that he loves a man. This is, then, if you haven’t noticed it already, closes the lid of the trap in which heterosexual men and perhaps even gay men have lived for ages. Shame forbids expression of love on both ends, towards men and women. A man, therefore is alone.
I argued in my last talk for changing our paradigm of male love for other males away from a rigid and boundaried understanding. This understanding sections men off into homosexual and heterosexual types. But it will not allow men to simply love each other, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Today I will argue that a man’s experience of needing love from a woman is similarly closed off for him, because as a boy he is supposed to learn that “love” must not be one of the ingredients of his courage, strength, perseverance and character. As a boy he is supposed to learn that the constant supply of love and warmth, a supply that can fuel him as richly as super-gasoline can fuel a Corvette, will run out and that he better learn how to exist and fight without it. A man learns as a young boy to live and accept his want of love as a permanent state of mind, body and soul. He might even think of the feeling of this want as honorable, as masculine and strong.
One might best understand men’s relationship to love by understanding it as specialized form of bulimia. Men might be less inclined to become physically bulimic, but it might very well be said that they know and are willing to go through bulimic patterns, i.e., through patterns of binging, starving and purging themselves with respect to love. So, when a man feels the want of love coming on, when he simultaneously feels the shame of “once again needing to be loved” he might decide to go on a binge. He might go through a string of pornographic experiences, he might masturbate incessantly for a few hours or days or longer, he might start another affair. But when it’s over, he will throw it all up. He might castigate himself, put himself under extreme workout or workstress, deny himself all comfort and love in order to eradicate the last bit of want that led him to his binging. Then, as you can imagine, all starts over again.
For boys to learn to live without love is a tough task. It is insurmountable, really, and in the end all boys and men fail at this task and return to the beginning of something not unlike an almost infantile need for love. Nevertheless the cycle of learning how to live without love is started again and again for most every boy who is born, especially, if this boy is born into our western culture. This cycle begins as an almost imperceptible difference in attention given to boys and girls when they’re infants. It moves on quite rapidly into the toddler years where boys are already expected to control their pain in manly ways and not expect to be comforted. This continues into the early years of schooling when boys’ need for love and warmth and the inadequate and insufficient responses given to them result in restlessness and trouble-making. This, of course, we are increasingly likely to diagnose as ADHD. As boys grow into pre-teens and teens we begin to measure them in terms of their manliness and maturity, we praise them, if they possess them, we ignore them and punish them, if they don’t. By the time the boy is indeed a young man, of course, we have called him that since about the time he was two, he has become thoroughly proficient at denying to himself and the world around him that needs and wants to be loved first and foremost.
Here is the irony: All along this roughly twenty year process we have told this boy in subtle and not so subtle ways that they should look to girls and women for love. We have primed them for being in a relationship in the worst possible way, viz. by bottling up their need for love. The rage at women expressed often by very young, college-aged men has, in my opinion, very little to do with male entitlement and much with not having been loved in meaningful ways for too long. But what man would say that? Instead this is expressed precisely in terms of entitlement. After all, after twenty years or so of suppressing their need to be loved, don’t they have a right to it now? Isn’t the woman who says “no” to them giving them a raw deal? Isn’t she breaking the social contract? Of course, she is not. But that is what it looks like from the perspective of deprivation that’s come with a promise of later fulfillment.
You see that this want and need can and must be hidden quite well. The man who is wanting love might have a quick fling with someone, a tea-room exchange with another man in a strange rest-area bath-room perhaps. Perhaps he will just masturbate as often as needed to maintain his strength and thrust as a man. Perhaps he will drink and seek to still his want for love in that way. And, lest anyone ever will find out a thing about this want, he may add anger and contempt at those who have the potential to love him (which ironically is everyonel he meets), thus saying the opposite of what’s really going on: I don’t need you, go away, you bother me.
One of the main functions of male anger, one might call them malfunctions or maybe male-functions, is to cover up the want, the indelible flaw. When men get angry they want to be loved, but they’re ashamed to admit it. Many men come to this threshold often without ever being able to cross over into real love.
You might wonder why I am speaking in such general terms. Certainly, you might think, this description might fit some men. Some might have a screwed up relationship to their need for love and those who could give it to them. But not all, not the ones I know. I would like to answer this in two ways a general one and a specific one:
The general one: think, look and ask again. Go to the men you think you know and ask them these two questions: Do you feel that you are loved well? If you feel you are not, would you admit it to those from whom you expect most to be loved?
The specific one: Simply think of the men in your life who, in one way or another, have voiced to you their anger, disappointment and dissatisfaction with women and love. Ask yourself this question: What do I know about how these men cope with their disappointment?
Here are some sample opinions about women male clients have expressed in sessions with me.
Do not trust a beautiful woman
Do not trust a woman who is clingy
Men’s Need for Attention from Women
A former client of mine described the issue of women’s power in his life like this. This client, by the way, is married, with several children, has never had an affair and states that he would likely not ever have an affair because of the “confusion” it would create:
Women are everywhere in my life. I am not just talking about my mother and sister. I am also talking about the ways in which I look for women when I am out and about. I could be at a café or restaurant, at the grocery store or the library, no matter where I am, I look for women. I know a woman has entered the space I am in without even looking up yet. I just sense it. If I try not to look up, I usually fail. Often I find myself judging quickly whether a woman is appealing to me or not. But even if she is not appealing to me, I might still find myself wondering what it would be like to have sex with her. I might still be trying to get her attention by looking at her for just a moment longer than would be customary, waiting to see, if she sees my face and turns towards me. I just have to see.
I have heard that some men only go for certain features in women. They like the ones with big breast or small breasts, big butts or small with voluptuous bodies or more boyish bodies, long hair or short hair. I can’t say that any of this is true for me. I don’t feel particularly turned off or on by body shapes. What I do know is this, if after checking out a woman, having seen her, having taken in what she looks like, I do get her attention, if she even smiles at me or speaks to me even, I am lost to thoughts of being with her. Then, at the latest, a jumble of thoughts and feelings takes hold of me that both feels good and fills me with a kind of yearning that is almost painful to bear. I feel alive and happy because I got something and also sad and almost angry because there is something I will not get.
I am struck how this description, despite its lingering on physical details and the objectifying ways in which this male seems to look at women runs towards a non-physical moment in which the woman, suddenly, holds all power. This is the moment when she pays attention to him. When her eyes meet his, when she smiles at him, when she tunes in to him, if only for a brief moment, he is lost and “a jumble of thoughts and feelings takes a hold” of him. Most likely none of the women my client scrutinizes in this way will be women with whom he will be in a relationship. In fact, we know that this man doesn’t really want to have a relationship with any of these women. He just wants to be seen by them, briefly connect with them and get their smile. For in succeeding to get their attention, in succeeding to get their smile he can, for just a moment, feel loved and comforted. This is a moment when he feels loved and seen. But since it is a moment that has no material reality, a moment whose impressions will fade away soon, it will have to be repeated.
To me this description is so valuable and intriguing because it helps us understand what I consider the core-issue in men’s at times predatory behaviors towards women: This issue is to be loved. My client might seem non-stereotypical because his pursuit of women is really not a chase or a hunt, it remains non-physical, though he admits that he might fantasize about a physical relationship later. But he captures what many hetero-sexual men seem to be quite unsure about: whether they are loved by a woman.
What, you might ask, is going on in this man’s marriage? This is a complicated issue. Listen to another longer quote:
I love my wife very much. But I can also find myself being incredibly angry with her. My feelings are almost always somewhere on a roller-coaster when I’m around her. There are times when I wish she’d die in a car-accident so I could be free again. Then there are times when I just wish I could crawl into her, be together with her and not feel any separation from her. She is taking care of our children in ways I couldn’t and wouldn’t. But sometimes I wish she’d take care of me more. When I tell her that, she tells me I behave like a stupid child and should grow up. Sometimes she does take care of me anyway, then I get insecure. When’s the other shoe going to drop, I wonder. What does she expect of me, I wonder. Will she accuse me of not spending enough time with her, of not thinking of anything exciting to do? Will she tell me I’m not doing enough around the house? Will she say I should spend more time with the kids? Will she tell me I am not sexual enough with her, get mad at me when I lose my erection, but then also tell me when I hug her or kiss her too long that I’m in the way and too demanding? Lately, I’ve found myself be less and less interested in her. I don’t think I’m isolating myself, but I don’t look at her as much anymore as I used to. I am no longer waiting. But I feel empty inside at the same time. I so much want a fulfilling relationship. I wish I didn’t always feel that I have to do something to be loved and deserve to be loved by her. Deep down, I guess, I feel like she doesn’t love me. Deep down it feels as if I’m chasing her to love me.
So, what’s going on in this man’s marriage is an unresolvable conflict between his dependency on her and his need to reject her as the locus of his dependency. His need for affirmation from her makes it impossible for him to leave. Yet, as he realizes (or thinks he realizes) that he will get this affirmation from her he engages in fantasies about her death or will actively seek moments of affirmation with other women.
Why doesn’t he leave her, you might ask. He admits that he has thought about this many times, but feels overwhelmed by the guilt and shame he feels for entertaining such thoughts. The only way he can imagine himself free again, is if she left him, died or otherwise disappeared from his life. He has to remain passive because, to the degree that he actively pursues his freedom, he will become less worthy of being loved.
Unconditional Acceptance
At the intersection of fear of and dependence on women men are seeking, I believe, to be accepted unconditionally by women, by a woman. The central question a man might ask will run something like this: Will you woman with your life-giving, essential power and with the ability to make or break me simply by seeing me and smiling at me, will you accept me given my condition of weakness that speaks out of these confessions? Of course, many men precisely fail to say it in this way. They are angry, i.e., afraid, they will not confess their weakness but blame women for it, continue to be hostile and, at times try their luck at hostile conquests. But this is what I suspect is going on underneath it all. This is what I am asking you to consider tonight: men who are hostile and angry with women, actually men who are hostile and angry in general, are men who are looking to be unconditionally accepted. They are men who are “wanting”. They are desperately afraid that the hole inside will become bigger and, finally hollow them out completely.
The overarching thesis of my talk today is that men have a difficult time admitting their want of love. Want is a funny word. You might already have noticed it in the way I just used it “admitting one’s want of love.” Commonly we think of wanting something as a way of expressing quite strongly and willfully that we would like to have something. But wanting something can also be used to point to what is lacking like in the sentence “your work is wanting.” So, when I talk about men wanting love I am not only saying that they willfully demand it. I am also saying that they are desperately wanting it, meaning missing it, lacking it and, therefore, looking for it.
The problem with wanting is that when it occurs in a project, an essay or a person we think of it as a flaw. When something is wanting we’re not simply pointing to something that needs to be corrected, something that could be easily adjusted. “wanting” means that something in the most fundamental sense is missing. Without that which is missing, i.e., if the wanting is on-going the thing that is wanting is incomplete, insufficient and, ultimately, not viable.
In other words, using the term “want” in the title of my essay today is implying that we can substitute for it the word “flawed”. Then, the title reads “can I admit the flaw of needing to be loved.” For a man to admit to his wanting love is to admit to a fundamental incompleteness in himself. It is so fundamental that, without it, he is not fully himself. He is limping, on crutches. He is handicapped.
To be sure, though, this admission is more than the average male vulnerability we have talked about in previous lectures. The admission that he needs to be loved is not simply a confession of softness and, perhaps, temporary weakness. Rather, this admission is a straight forward admission of shame. Wanting to be loved, wholly and in our entirety, wanting not to be dismissed or sent away to calm our pain and help ourselves is to say I am shameful. For a heterosexual man the shame of wanting to be loved is at about the same level as is the confession that he loves a man. This is, then, if you haven’t noticed it already, closes the lid of the trap in which heterosexual men and perhaps even gay men have lived for ages. Shame forbids expression of love on both ends, towards men and women. A man, therefore is alone.
I argued in my last talk for changing our paradigm of male love for other males away from a rigid and boundaried understanding. This understanding sections men off into homosexual and heterosexual types. But it will not allow men to simply love each other, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Today I will argue that a man’s experience of needing love from a woman is similarly closed off for him, because as a boy he is supposed to learn that “love” must not be one of the ingredients of his courage, strength, perseverance and character. As a boy he is supposed to learn that the constant supply of love and warmth, a supply that can fuel him as richly as super-gasoline can fuel a Corvette, will run out and that he better learn how to exist and fight without it. A man learns as a young boy to live and accept his want of love as a permanent state of mind, body and soul. He might even think of the feeling of this want as honorable, as masculine and strong.
One might best understand men’s relationship to love by understanding it as specialized form of bulimia. Men might be less inclined to become physically bulimic, but it might very well be said that they know and are willing to go through bulimic patterns, i.e., through patterns of binging, starving and purging themselves with respect to love. So, when a man feels the want of love coming on, when he simultaneously feels the shame of “once again needing to be loved” he might decide to go on a binge. He might go through a string of pornographic experiences, he might masturbate incessantly for a few hours or days or longer, he might start another affair. But when it’s over, he will throw it all up. He might castigate himself, put himself under extreme workout or workstress, deny himself all comfort and love in order to eradicate the last bit of want that led him to his binging. Then, as you can imagine, all starts over again.
For boys to learn to live without love is a tough task. It is insurmountable, really, and in the end all boys and men fail at this task and return to the beginning of something not unlike an almost infantile need for love. Nevertheless the cycle of learning how to live without love is started again and again for most every boy who is born, especially, if this boy is born into our western culture. This cycle begins as an almost imperceptible difference in attention given to boys and girls when they’re infants. It moves on quite rapidly into the toddler years where boys are already expected to control their pain in manly ways and not expect to be comforted. This continues into the early years of schooling when boys’ need for love and warmth and the inadequate and insufficient responses given to them result in restlessness and trouble-making. This, of course, we are increasingly likely to diagnose as ADHD. As boys grow into pre-teens and teens we begin to measure them in terms of their manliness and maturity, we praise them, if they possess them, we ignore them and punish them, if they don’t. By the time the boy is indeed a young man, of course, we have called him that since about the time he was two, he has become thoroughly proficient at denying to himself and the world around him that needs and wants to be loved first and foremost.
Here is the irony: All along this roughly twenty year process we have told this boy in subtle and not so subtle ways that they should look to girls and women for love. We have primed them for being in a relationship in the worst possible way, viz. by bottling up their need for love. The rage at women expressed often by very young, college-aged men has, in my opinion, very little to do with male entitlement and much with not having been loved in meaningful ways for too long. But what man would say that? Instead this is expressed precisely in terms of entitlement. After all, after twenty years or so of suppressing their need to be loved, don’t they have a right to it now? Isn’t the woman who says “no” to them giving them a raw deal? Isn’t she breaking the social contract? Of course, she is not. But that is what it looks like from the perspective of deprivation that’s come with a promise of later fulfillment.
You see that this want and need can and must be hidden quite well. The man who is wanting love might have a quick fling with someone, a tea-room exchange with another man in a strange rest-area bath-room perhaps. Perhaps he will just masturbate as often as needed to maintain his strength and thrust as a man. Perhaps he will drink and seek to still his want for love in that way. And, lest anyone ever will find out a thing about this want, he may add anger and contempt at those who have the potential to love him (which ironically is everyonel he meets), thus saying the opposite of what’s really going on: I don’t need you, go away, you bother me.
One of the main functions of male anger, one might call them malfunctions or maybe male-functions, is to cover up the want, the indelible flaw. When men get angry they want to be loved, but they’re ashamed to admit it. Many men come to this threshold often without ever being able to cross over into real love.
You might wonder why I am speaking in such general terms. Certainly, you might think, this description might fit some men. Some might have a screwed up relationship to their need for love and those who could give it to them. But not all, not the ones I know. I would like to answer this in two ways a general one and a specific one:
The general one: think, look and ask again. Go to the men you think you know and ask them these two questions: Do you feel that you are loved well? If you feel you are not, would you admit it to those from whom you expect most to be loved?
The specific one: Simply think of the men in your life who, in one way or another, have voiced to you their anger, disappointment and dissatisfaction with women and love. Ask yourself this question: What do I know about how these men cope with their disappointment?
Here are some sample opinions about women male clients have expressed in sessions with me.
Do not trust a beautiful woman
Do not trust a woman who is clingy
Do not trust a woman who is lost/clueless
Do not trust a woman who is needy
Do not trust a mysterious woman.
Do not trust an independent woman
Do not trust a confident woman
Do not trust a woman who wants sex
Do not trust a woman who does not want sex.
All of these have in common, in spite of their even contradictory nature, this further statement of the same person: “I know a woman like that. I am attached to someone like that. She is not loving me the way I need to be loved.”
It would be so easy to dismiss these as the misogynist fabulations of a disgruntled group of men. Doing so, though, would be missing entirely the vast anxiety that is contained in these statements. Their inherent misogyny not withstanding, these statements speak of the fear of abandonment and loneliness that can beset men when it comes to spending time in relationships with women. It might be easy, too, to analyze these feelings of men as caused by bad mothering. And although mothering is an important aspect of how men will eventually feel about women, it is not bad mothering but rather the cultural forces that align mothering and fathering in a way that is detrimental to men and sets them up for cyclical and intergenerational empathic failures with women and others.
So far in my clinical experience of about 10 + years there has not been a single male, heterosexual client who has not complained about problems with his partner. In fact, the overwhelming majority of men enter therapy because they are experiencing a crisis in their relationship. The list above only samples some of the reasons that men give why their relationships with women are not working out, but its contradictory nature bespeaks the fact that when it comes to women heterosexual men seem to be able to be suspicious of them in all kinds of ways.
They could complain about problems with their family of origin, with their friends, with siblings, a boss, colleagues, etc. And some of them do bring those issues. But none of the issues is so invariably problematic for all of my male clients than the issue of their relationship with a member of the other sex. This even holds true, by the way, for my gay clients which means even when the relationship is non-romantic does it pose problems that seem to over shadow many men’s lives.
As men go about forming their opinions about women all of them seem to follow a similar pattern of need and aggression. This pattern will simultaneously lead them to desiring a female companion, needing her for comfort and nurturing and grieving her loss/absence while also rejecting her for her unwillingness to be present and available.
The word “simultaneous” is significant because it doesn’t just mean that men love and hate a certain woman at the same time. Rather it means that love and hate, need and aggression might be wrapped into each other in a way that makes it hard for an outsider, or the man in question, to understand the difference. Men seem so utterly dependent on women that they can only hate them for having so much power over them. What is going on?
The Trauma of Oedipus
In his essay The Trauma of Oedipus: Toward a New Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Men William Pollack discusses what he believes to be a basic misunderstanding by Sigmund Freud of the significance of Oedipal structures in a man’s life. Freud had stated so famously about men: where they love they do not desire and where they desire the cannot love. Pollack argues that
To a large extent (whether openly or unwittingly), our psychology of men and the dynamic psychotherapies that emanate from it have accepted either this aggression and desire/conflict-based model or, alternatively, a paradigm of separation/autonomy for understanding and for attempting to treat men’s pain.
Pollack believes that
"Listening to male patients reveals a fissure in their self-systems, one beginning well before the Oedipal Period."
He continues saying that
"Historical, cultural and economic forces affect parenting styles so as to make it likely that, as boys, men will suffer a traumatic disruption of their early holding environment, a premature psychic separation from both maternal and paternal caregivers. This is a normal male, gender-linked, loss a trauma of abandonment for boys which may appear later in adult men, through symptomatic behavior and characterological defense."
When these symptomatic behaviors and defense mechanisms take place, Pollack argues, men are likely to develop
"empathic disruptions in their relationships (love/desire splits in romance or an inability to commit) as an attempt to unconsciously protect against further loss, limited emotionality with an intolerance of feelings of vulnerability, or to express and bear sadness; which consequently hinders their ability to grieve—to mourn, and to change. These defenses are often incorporated into a syntonic character armor blocking a man’s overt expression of all strong feelings, except anger, and may be maintained and consciously, and valued, as a (false) self-sufficiency."
Pollack has been studying this behavior in much detail and had earlier in his career named it “defensive autonomy.”
Interestingly, Pollack associates these kinds of male defensive autonomy and empathic failure with a misreading of the Oedipus myth both by Freud himself but also by those who, later, used Freud’s work on the Oedipus complex to devise parenting advice and strategies. Again Pollack:
"Freud chose to ignore Oedipus’ earliest trauma, blaming the fantasies of the unconscious. But, in fact, the story of Oedipus is indeed a tale of a young boy betrayed and abandoned to die by his own mother and father [my italics]. It is not Oedipus’ unconscious lust for his mother or jealousy of his father that sets the stage for downfall, but his parents; hurtful rejection of him. The point is not to condemn mothers and fathers but rather to highlight that men may either feel, or unconsciously experience a sense of having been prematurely and traumatically abandoned, betrayed, or hurtfully separated from their primary love objects. Like Oedipus, most men have no conscious memory of this earlier trauma, though their vulnerabilities (especially to shame) in adult life may be the evidence of the unhealed wound. I believe that this normative traumatic abrogation of the holding environment, for boys, comes about due to a complex combination of factors."
In summary, because the Oedipus myth was once believed to describe the unhealthy lust of a son for his mother, it was believed that, in order for men to be psychologically healthy, they should dis-identify from their mothers. In other words, a boy who seemed too close to his mother (and to his father) was eyed suspiciously by others as he had not separated enough from them. Pollack concludes that boys and men are quite likely to reject any sense others could have of them as being close to their mothers because this would conflict with their gender-identity as masculine men.
But can the boy who has mastered the culturally expected task of disidentification really forget his mother or his father? What do they remember about that stage of oneness that once, a long time ago, connected them too their mothers and their fathers? Pollack argues [based on the work of Nancy Chodorow’s book Mothering] that boys’ disidentification is likely accompanied by his parents’ simultaneous attempts to push him out. “Boys are more likely to have been pushed out of the pre-Oedipal relationship and to have had to curtail their primary love and sense of empathic tie” with their primary care-givers.”
The Biological and Sociological Underpinnings of Men’s Vulnerability
What, hopefully, we’re beginning to see is that men’s vulnerability is both a biological and sociological reality. The unconscious Oedipal patterns that may have contributed to the idea that men should dis-identify early from their caregivers, simply because they are men, is reinforced by a sociological/cultural pattern that separates and, as Pollack says, bifurcates role-socialization of boys and men. We have long understood that this kind of separation and bifurcation is bad for women, but we have yet to see that boys and men as well are negatively affected by it. This might be one of the necessary core-insights into understanding the even deeper insight that men are negatively affected by patriarchal structures. It might help us understand that patriarchal structures and men are not one and the same thing. While it is historically true that they were largely created by men, perhaps to maintain and reinforce their own power, these structures have long since turned against men, holding them hostage now in ways that are emotionally hurtful to them as well as women.
The Power of Women in the Lives of Men
Men’s Fear of Women
At a time when we have learned thoroughly the lessons of feminism about patriarchy i.e., the male driven exploitation of women, their oppression subjugation and marginalization, it might be somewhat difficult to conceive of men as being helpless and angry in the face of female power. It remains to be understood, though, if not part of the centuries-old oppression of women is not also the result of male fear of women.
The story of a certain woman, Eve, who is mysterious and alluring and physically partakes in the body of the man who loves her, Adam, is not just a story that is meant to blame women for having “brought sin into the world” it is also a story that bespeaks powerfully men’s fear of women. Eve’s name alone formed of the same letters that also make up the tetragrammaton, the name of God, suggests that Eve’s very being is about being connected to the essence of God. “Essence” is what her name means. Often it is translated as the one who has a womb, who bears children. “Eve” means life and control over life. Later we find out that this is not the only connection Eve has. In addition to partaking in God’s essence she is also connected to the dark force represented by the snake. Her ability to communicate with the snake bespeaks this connection. Adam, on the other hand, is only made of earth, dry ground so to speak. And although the story tells that Eve came second and was formed of the “rib” of Adam, he seems utterly dependent on her moves, her insight and decision. Of course, the story’s purpose seems to be to lay blame with woman for having gone against the will of God, listened to the snake, eaten of the tree of knowledge and seduced the man. Yet, one cannot help but sense a certain naivete and immaturity that surrounds the claim that woman is responsible for the destruction of the paradisical state men and women were once in together. After all, wasn’t it that move precisely that enabled humans to grow and learn and, therefore, to become who they are?
This story, in other words, summarizes well the power of women.
Women are connected to the invisible powers both dark and light ones that fill the universe.
Women give life.
Women drive decision-making
Women are alluring.
Women move humanity towards new territories, new discoveries.
Do not trust a woman who is needy
Do not trust a mysterious woman.
Do not trust an independent woman
Do not trust a confident woman
Do not trust a woman who wants sex
Do not trust a woman who does not want sex.
All of these have in common, in spite of their even contradictory nature, this further statement of the same person: “I know a woman like that. I am attached to someone like that. She is not loving me the way I need to be loved.”
It would be so easy to dismiss these as the misogynist fabulations of a disgruntled group of men. Doing so, though, would be missing entirely the vast anxiety that is contained in these statements. Their inherent misogyny not withstanding, these statements speak of the fear of abandonment and loneliness that can beset men when it comes to spending time in relationships with women. It might be easy, too, to analyze these feelings of men as caused by bad mothering. And although mothering is an important aspect of how men will eventually feel about women, it is not bad mothering but rather the cultural forces that align mothering and fathering in a way that is detrimental to men and sets them up for cyclical and intergenerational empathic failures with women and others.
So far in my clinical experience of about 10 + years there has not been a single male, heterosexual client who has not complained about problems with his partner. In fact, the overwhelming majority of men enter therapy because they are experiencing a crisis in their relationship. The list above only samples some of the reasons that men give why their relationships with women are not working out, but its contradictory nature bespeaks the fact that when it comes to women heterosexual men seem to be able to be suspicious of them in all kinds of ways.
They could complain about problems with their family of origin, with their friends, with siblings, a boss, colleagues, etc. And some of them do bring those issues. But none of the issues is so invariably problematic for all of my male clients than the issue of their relationship with a member of the other sex. This even holds true, by the way, for my gay clients which means even when the relationship is non-romantic does it pose problems that seem to over shadow many men’s lives.
As men go about forming their opinions about women all of them seem to follow a similar pattern of need and aggression. This pattern will simultaneously lead them to desiring a female companion, needing her for comfort and nurturing and grieving her loss/absence while also rejecting her for her unwillingness to be present and available.
The word “simultaneous” is significant because it doesn’t just mean that men love and hate a certain woman at the same time. Rather it means that love and hate, need and aggression might be wrapped into each other in a way that makes it hard for an outsider, or the man in question, to understand the difference. Men seem so utterly dependent on women that they can only hate them for having so much power over them. What is going on?
The Trauma of Oedipus
In his essay The Trauma of Oedipus: Toward a New Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Men William Pollack discusses what he believes to be a basic misunderstanding by Sigmund Freud of the significance of Oedipal structures in a man’s life. Freud had stated so famously about men: where they love they do not desire and where they desire the cannot love. Pollack argues that
To a large extent (whether openly or unwittingly), our psychology of men and the dynamic psychotherapies that emanate from it have accepted either this aggression and desire/conflict-based model or, alternatively, a paradigm of separation/autonomy for understanding and for attempting to treat men’s pain.
Pollack believes that
"Listening to male patients reveals a fissure in their self-systems, one beginning well before the Oedipal Period."
He continues saying that
"Historical, cultural and economic forces affect parenting styles so as to make it likely that, as boys, men will suffer a traumatic disruption of their early holding environment, a premature psychic separation from both maternal and paternal caregivers. This is a normal male, gender-linked, loss a trauma of abandonment for boys which may appear later in adult men, through symptomatic behavior and characterological defense."
When these symptomatic behaviors and defense mechanisms take place, Pollack argues, men are likely to develop
"empathic disruptions in their relationships (love/desire splits in romance or an inability to commit) as an attempt to unconsciously protect against further loss, limited emotionality with an intolerance of feelings of vulnerability, or to express and bear sadness; which consequently hinders their ability to grieve—to mourn, and to change. These defenses are often incorporated into a syntonic character armor blocking a man’s overt expression of all strong feelings, except anger, and may be maintained and consciously, and valued, as a (false) self-sufficiency."
Pollack has been studying this behavior in much detail and had earlier in his career named it “defensive autonomy.”
Interestingly, Pollack associates these kinds of male defensive autonomy and empathic failure with a misreading of the Oedipus myth both by Freud himself but also by those who, later, used Freud’s work on the Oedipus complex to devise parenting advice and strategies. Again Pollack:
"Freud chose to ignore Oedipus’ earliest trauma, blaming the fantasies of the unconscious. But, in fact, the story of Oedipus is indeed a tale of a young boy betrayed and abandoned to die by his own mother and father [my italics]. It is not Oedipus’ unconscious lust for his mother or jealousy of his father that sets the stage for downfall, but his parents; hurtful rejection of him. The point is not to condemn mothers and fathers but rather to highlight that men may either feel, or unconsciously experience a sense of having been prematurely and traumatically abandoned, betrayed, or hurtfully separated from their primary love objects. Like Oedipus, most men have no conscious memory of this earlier trauma, though their vulnerabilities (especially to shame) in adult life may be the evidence of the unhealed wound. I believe that this normative traumatic abrogation of the holding environment, for boys, comes about due to a complex combination of factors."
In summary, because the Oedipus myth was once believed to describe the unhealthy lust of a son for his mother, it was believed that, in order for men to be psychologically healthy, they should dis-identify from their mothers. In other words, a boy who seemed too close to his mother (and to his father) was eyed suspiciously by others as he had not separated enough from them. Pollack concludes that boys and men are quite likely to reject any sense others could have of them as being close to their mothers because this would conflict with their gender-identity as masculine men.
But can the boy who has mastered the culturally expected task of disidentification really forget his mother or his father? What do they remember about that stage of oneness that once, a long time ago, connected them too their mothers and their fathers? Pollack argues [based on the work of Nancy Chodorow’s book Mothering] that boys’ disidentification is likely accompanied by his parents’ simultaneous attempts to push him out. “Boys are more likely to have been pushed out of the pre-Oedipal relationship and to have had to curtail their primary love and sense of empathic tie” with their primary care-givers.”
The Biological and Sociological Underpinnings of Men’s Vulnerability
What, hopefully, we’re beginning to see is that men’s vulnerability is both a biological and sociological reality. The unconscious Oedipal patterns that may have contributed to the idea that men should dis-identify early from their caregivers, simply because they are men, is reinforced by a sociological/cultural pattern that separates and, as Pollack says, bifurcates role-socialization of boys and men. We have long understood that this kind of separation and bifurcation is bad for women, but we have yet to see that boys and men as well are negatively affected by it. This might be one of the necessary core-insights into understanding the even deeper insight that men are negatively affected by patriarchal structures. It might help us understand that patriarchal structures and men are not one and the same thing. While it is historically true that they were largely created by men, perhaps to maintain and reinforce their own power, these structures have long since turned against men, holding them hostage now in ways that are emotionally hurtful to them as well as women.
The Power of Women in the Lives of Men
Men’s Fear of Women
At a time when we have learned thoroughly the lessons of feminism about patriarchy i.e., the male driven exploitation of women, their oppression subjugation and marginalization, it might be somewhat difficult to conceive of men as being helpless and angry in the face of female power. It remains to be understood, though, if not part of the centuries-old oppression of women is not also the result of male fear of women.
The story of a certain woman, Eve, who is mysterious and alluring and physically partakes in the body of the man who loves her, Adam, is not just a story that is meant to blame women for having “brought sin into the world” it is also a story that bespeaks powerfully men’s fear of women. Eve’s name alone formed of the same letters that also make up the tetragrammaton, the name of God, suggests that Eve’s very being is about being connected to the essence of God. “Essence” is what her name means. Often it is translated as the one who has a womb, who bears children. “Eve” means life and control over life. Later we find out that this is not the only connection Eve has. In addition to partaking in God’s essence she is also connected to the dark force represented by the snake. Her ability to communicate with the snake bespeaks this connection. Adam, on the other hand, is only made of earth, dry ground so to speak. And although the story tells that Eve came second and was formed of the “rib” of Adam, he seems utterly dependent on her moves, her insight and decision. Of course, the story’s purpose seems to be to lay blame with woman for having gone against the will of God, listened to the snake, eaten of the tree of knowledge and seduced the man. Yet, one cannot help but sense a certain naivete and immaturity that surrounds the claim that woman is responsible for the destruction of the paradisical state men and women were once in together. After all, wasn’t it that move precisely that enabled humans to grow and learn and, therefore, to become who they are?
This story, in other words, summarizes well the power of women.
Women are connected to the invisible powers both dark and light ones that fill the universe.
Women give life.
Women drive decision-making
Women are alluring.
Women move humanity towards new territories, new discoveries.
Men’s Need for Attention from Women
A former client of mine described the issue of women’s power in his life like this. This client, by the way, is married, with several children, has never had an affair and states that he would likely not ever have an affair because of the “confusion” it would create:
Women are everywhere in my life. I am not just talking about my mother and sister. I am also talking about the ways in which I look for women when I am out and about. I could be at a café or restaurant, at the grocery store or the library, no matter where I am, I look for women. I know a woman has entered the space I am in without even looking up yet. I just sense it. If I try not to look up, I usually fail. Often I find myself judging quickly whether a woman is appealing to me or not. But even if she is not appealing to me, I might still find myself wondering what it would be like to have sex with her. I might still be trying to get her attention by looking at her for just a moment longer than would be customary, waiting to see, if she sees my face and turns towards me. I just have to see.
I have heard that some men only go for certain features in women. They like the ones with big breast or small breasts, big butts or small with voluptuous bodies or more boyish bodies, long hair or short hair. I can’t say that any of this is true for me. I don’t feel particularly turned off or on by body shapes. What I do know is this, if after checking out a woman, having seen her, having taken in what she looks like, I do get her attention, if she even smiles at me or speaks to me even, I am lost to thoughts of being with her. Then, at the latest, a jumble of thoughts and feelings takes hold of me that both feels good and fills me with a kind of yearning that is almost painful to bear. I feel alive and happy because I got something and also sad and almost angry because there is something I will not get.
I am struck how this description, despite its lingering on physical details and the objectifying ways in which this male seems to look at women runs towards a non-physical moment in which the woman, suddenly, holds all power. This is the moment when she pays attention to him. When her eyes meet his, when she smiles at him, when she tunes in to him, if only for a brief moment, he is lost and “a jumble of thoughts and feelings takes a hold” of him. Most likely none of the women my client scrutinizes in this way will be women with whom he will be in a relationship. In fact, we know that this man doesn’t really want to have a relationship with any of these women. He just wants to be seen by them, briefly connect with them and get their smile. For in succeeding to get their attention, in succeeding to get their smile he can, for just a moment, feel loved and comforted. This is a moment when he feels loved and seen. But since it is a moment that has no material reality, a moment whose impressions will fade away soon, it will have to be repeated.
To me this description is so valuable and intriguing because it helps us understand what I consider the core-issue in men’s at times predatory behaviors towards women: This issue is to be loved. My client might seem non-stereotypical because his pursuit of women is really not a chase or a hunt, it remains non-physical, though he admits that he might fantasize about a physical relationship later. But he captures what many hetero-sexual men seem to be quite unsure about: whether they are loved by a woman.
What, you might ask, is going on in this man’s marriage? This is a complicated issue. Listen to another longer quote:
I love my wife very much. But I can also find myself being incredibly angry with her. My feelings are almost always somewhere on a roller-coaster when I’m around her. There are times when I wish she’d die in a car-accident so I could be free again. Then there are times when I just wish I could crawl into her, be together with her and not feel any separation from her. She is taking care of our children in ways I couldn’t and wouldn’t. But sometimes I wish she’d take care of me more. When I tell her that, she tells me I behave like a stupid child and should grow up. Sometimes she does take care of me anyway, then I get insecure. When’s the other shoe going to drop, I wonder. What does she expect of me, I wonder. Will she accuse me of not spending enough time with her, of not thinking of anything exciting to do? Will she tell me I’m not doing enough around the house? Will she say I should spend more time with the kids? Will she tell me I am not sexual enough with her, get mad at me when I lose my erection, but then also tell me when I hug her or kiss her too long that I’m in the way and too demanding? Lately, I’ve found myself be less and less interested in her. I don’t think I’m isolating myself, but I don’t look at her as much anymore as I used to. I am no longer waiting. But I feel empty inside at the same time. I so much want a fulfilling relationship. I wish I didn’t always feel that I have to do something to be loved and deserve to be loved by her. Deep down, I guess, I feel like she doesn’t love me. Deep down it feels as if I’m chasing her to love me.
So, what’s going on in this man’s marriage is an unresolvable conflict between his dependency on her and his need to reject her as the locus of his dependency. His need for affirmation from her makes it impossible for him to leave. Yet, as he realizes (or thinks he realizes) that he will get this affirmation from her he engages in fantasies about her death or will actively seek moments of affirmation with other women.
Why doesn’t he leave her, you might ask. He admits that he has thought about this many times, but feels overwhelmed by the guilt and shame he feels for entertaining such thoughts. The only way he can imagine himself free again, is if she left him, died or otherwise disappeared from his life. He has to remain passive because, to the degree that he actively pursues his freedom, he will become less worthy of being loved.
Unconditional Acceptance
At the intersection of fear of and dependence on women men are seeking, I believe, to be accepted unconditionally by women, by a woman. The central question a man might ask will run something like this: Will you woman with your life-giving, essential power and with the ability to make or break me simply by seeing me and smiling at me, will you accept me given my condition of weakness that speaks out of these confessions? Of course, many men precisely fail to say it in this way. They are angry, i.e., afraid, they will not confess their weakness but blame women for it, continue to be hostile and, at times try their luck at hostile conquests. But this is what I suspect is going on underneath it all. This is what I am asking you to consider tonight: men who are hostile and angry with women, actually men who are hostile and angry in general, are men who are looking to be unconditionally accepted. They are men who are “wanting”. They are desperately afraid that the hole inside will become bigger and, finally hollow them out completely.
