MENtal Health

The Birth of Man

As a boy, I loved when my dad would open his arms to pick me up. I knew from a very young age that he did not like it when I touched his face. But in these moments being lifted up to his chest, I had the chance that my face would touch his jaw randomly. I could feel the piercing edges of his beard hair on my soft cheeks. I would inhale his aftershave that smelled to me like a jungle with a field of flowers. He did not say a lot at this moment, and I did not need that. I could feel his heart anyway. All I needed was my weight in his arms, the piercing of his facial hair, and his scent.

When he would wear a suit and a tie, this was not the time to carry me. Then I knew he would go to work, and his face often looked tense. He worked a lot. Sometimes he would wear a suit and a tie even on a Sunday. The times in his arms on the edge of the jungle were rare.
So I tried to connect with him in a different way. I made drawings and showed them to him. Many times he looked at them, maybe said a short "Good“ and then would turn away again.

One time, I saw a black-and-white photo of him on a shelf wearing a suit and a tie where he looked relaxed. I pointed to it when he was at home. “Dad, this is a nice picture of you“, I told him. He looked at himself and said: “Too soft. That’s not good. Too soft.“

Was this the way to be a man? I wondered.

I needed to know. As a teenager, I knew the world asked me to become a man, as I was called a boy.

After my mum divorced my dad, I could only see him once a month. So I secretly looked at my peers if they knew how to become a man. But they seemed not to know either. When my mum moved to another city with me, I lost my friends. In one of the rare meetings with my dad, I told him that I was sad about it. “It is good to be alone“, he said. „Other people just distract you from your path.“

I sit in the Berlin office of my psychotherapeutic practice and feel a wave of sadness remembering this. I look outside the window to the city I was born in. I remember how I found new friends again back then in the new city, how I did my training in Gestalt Therapy, and how through all that time, the quest to know what it is to be a man kept coming back as I can feel it in the men that come to my practice now.

In former times, tribes were ruling humanity, and boys would be initiated into masculinity by other men in a once-in-a-lifetime ritual to find the mystery of the Divine Masculine.

Was this the way? Joseph Campbell writes in his seminal book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces“:
"Initiation combines an introduction of the candidate into the techniques, duties, and prerogatives of his vocation with a radical readjustment of his emotional relationship to the parental images.“

Campbell writes beautifully about how tribes around the world initiated boys into men in a magnificent hero’s journey that works similarly around the globe.

Today in the western world, tribes seem to not rule anymore. Their beauty is gone, and so are the hero’s journeys with initiations for men.
Yet, when I watch the news, the downside of tribal culture survived. From Brasil to Hungary in so-called civilized societies around the world, national borders and interests are reinforced by their de facto tribal leaders who do not include the needs of the world in their politics.
It seems to me, in the tribe-national world, boys don’t become men, boys become presidents.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell saw this coming: "The national idea, with the flag as totem, is today an aggrandizer of the nursery ego, not the annihilation of an infantile situation.“

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