How did you come to write the book?
I think it was a book needed to write. It's been closely related to my own development as a man over the last ten years. It was triggered off first of all by reading Robert Bly's Iron John; although there were parts of it I liked, there were other parts I felt uncomfortable about. And then going to a menswork conference run by Robert Bly and James Hillman in 1994, again I got a lot out of it, but was quite uncomfortable with certain aspects. So after that conference I started reading around the subject in some detail.
What was it about the conference that made you feel uncomfortable?
There had been a lot of talk about the monsters men have. The brother who doesn't like you, who's not on your side. The last night ritual involved dressing up an old tree trunk on the far side of the fence in the gardens at Gaunts House to represent the monster, and making ritual sacrifices to it. So there was a whole tribal thing about being on home ground, and then there was the boundary fence, and on the other side of the boundary fence is where the baddies are. It was very dualistic: us, good, on this side of the fence, and the evil on the other side, and never the twain shall meet. All you could do to deal with the monster was to propitiate it with sacrifices. I felt uncomfortable with that.
The next morning we did a final ceremony where we held hands, and every man had a chance to greet every other man and say goodbye. And I suddenly had an insight during this that we hadn't included the monster, and that we should have done. For instance, if it had been a conference of women they would have found a way of bringing the monster in, and because we were men we hadn't done it, and the monster was still out there on the other side of the fence, still hostile because he was left out. And I thought 'This is not the right way to deal with monsters: we have to find a better way' This book is about finding that way.
How did you become involved with the Continuum Concept?
I've been a psychologist most of my working life, and then in the late 80s, having met Jean Liedloff socially, and got interested in her ideas, I trained with her as a psychotherapist and took over her practice in North London, where she lived at the time (she is actually American), because she was going to live in California. Without a doubt working with Jean was a life changing experience for me. It was as if her ideas were something I'd been looking for my whole life. Since then I've worked as a therapist part time, and have continued to work with organisations, which I was doing before, and more and more writing and research in recent years.
Can you explain the Continuum Concept for readers who are not familiar with it?
What Jean Liedloff is saying essentially is that if we want to know what kind of species we are we need to look at what is left of the hunter gatherers, because we are the same as them biologically, but they haven't had the advantage of 'civilisation'. So they probably live quite close to the way we lived before western civilisation came along, which may, perhaps, be closer to how nature originally intended us to live.
Jean was not saying that we should return to living like them, but that if we want a reference point for things that have gone wrong in our society, then it would be useful to look at them, because what she observed in the many months she lived with them, was that they don't seem to suffer from the kind of neurotic ills that we have. Although they're aggressive, they're not a destructive society, and on the whole they appear to enjoy a level of happiness in their society which is way above anything within our experience.
She puts that down, not to the fact they live a simple life in the rain forest - because actually although it's simple, it's certainly not particularly easy, and it's often life-threatening - but largely to the way they bring up their children, which is with a great deal more respect for their nature than we do. So, I said to Jean I thought she had rediscovered the concept of original virtue, as opposed to the concept of original sin, which underpins our own society, so that we tend to regard children from birth as being anti-social, uncooperative, and sort of imbued with the Devil. There is a long history within the Judaeo-Christian tradition of treating children as if they need the devil driven out of them before they can become civilised human beings.
| every child... wants to be told how to be a useful and co-operative member of society |
The Yequana view of children is quite opposite to that. Their religion, their philosophy is not dualistic, it's monistic, so they believe that the eternal spirit is born with every child, and is to be honoured through human nature. And therefore the kinds of signals which a child gives as to how it requires to be treated are to be respected. The word 'respect' has a very central place in Jean Liedloff's philosophy The child rearing principles which she identified with the Yequana are neither punitive nor permissive. She believes that the whole business of every child is to become an emotionally mature adult; that they want to be told how to be a useful and co-operative member of society And that is the thing we can transfer to our own society. If we believe what Jean says, and if we want to adopt a Continuum way of doing things, it doesn't mean we have to go and live in the rain forest. What we can transfer is this respect for human nature, and the need children have for recognition of their nature. And indeed there are many thousands of parents in the western world who are following Jean Liedloff's ideas, who are successfully doing that with their own children, breeding human beings who are, I believe, likely to be more whole and emotionally mature than the rest of us. Jean always said that the key to parenting is to know that you and your kids both want the same thing, deep down. And if you can find that level, then you're in harmony.
I know there's a whole area about Continuum-conscious therapy which you've written about in another book But our focus is going to be on your book on masculinity and its relationship to initiation and so forth. What's the title of the book?
At the moment it has two working titles: Men Don't Have to be Monsters, which is the publisher's title, and which I'm not entirely happy with, and the other one is Whole in the Heart. There's a pun there, because the subject matter of the book is to do with the fact that men, in their upbringing, often have their heart side suppressed, and a split is created between the head and the heart. So Hole in the Heart expresses that, Whole in the Heart expresses the healing of that.
The book's divided into four parts. The first part is about what our patriarchal culture does to children. It draws comparisons between the way children are treated in our society and the way they are treated in other non-patriarchal societies, and what we have to draw on for that are various tribal societies through anthropology, and various past societies which have been discovered through history and archaeology. Those comparisons allow us to see that the way we treat children in our society and in particular the way we treat male children, is specific to our culture, and by no means universal.
Following up on Jean Liedloff's ideas, there is a broad tradition in non-patriarchal tribal societies of treating children with a great deal more respect, and a great deal more recognition of their nature, and a great deal less emotional deprivation than is conventional in our society.
The second part is the historical side of that. It takes us back to before the patriarchal era. The purpose of that is to show that history didn't start with classical Greece, nor with the book of Genesis and the Bible, and that there was a period of history before that when there existed non-patriarchal societies where people lived in a different way.
That leads into the third part of the book, which describes the stages in a man's life which typically arise out of having had a patriarchal upbringing. It's really a portrait of the patriarchal personality. At some point in the lives of most men we face some sort of emotional crisis, and that is the point at which we're presented with opportunities to transform ourselves, as I see it. When we hit mid-life crisis, we can either push it under the carpet, smooth it over, follow the conventional patriarchal path in dealing with it, or we can use it as an opportunity to break out of patriarchal consciousness into something else, and that something else, that transformation process is covered in the fourth part of the book.
So let's go back to the historical aspect. Can you say some more about that?
Over the last 50 years or so there's been a great deal of archaeological research into the Neolithic Era of what used to be called pre-history. Roughly speaking, from 4000 or 5000 BC onwards for several thousand years, there were societies living in the eastern Mediterranean area which were very different to our own. They appear to be have been able to maintain a much more even balance between the masculine and feminine sides of human nature than we do in western society. They were peaceable agriculturists, but by no means primitive. Minoan Crete, for example, was very sophisticated.
These Neolithic societies were then overrun by other societies of nomads who came in from further north in eastern Europe and western Asia, from the highlands and steppes of Asia, who were herders, tended sheep and rode horses, and who lived a much harsher existence than the settled agricultural folk they overran. This harsh existence had caused them to evolve a culture where there was a much greater differentiation between male and female, because there was a need for individuals who would be ready to go out and be warriors and defend territory against neighbouring tribes, who would be ready to hunt large animals and to be out in all weathers looking after the herds. And this required a toughness which created this role differentiation, and made them a much more aggressive kind of society.
Over a period of two or three thousand years basically they overran the settled agricultural societies. And it was those budding patriarchal societies which became the foundation for western civilisation. Some of them also came up from Palestine through the desert; we know them from the Bible as the Hebrews. The Old Testament is all about them. They brought with them male Gods, sky Gods, warrior Gods, like Jehovah, who displaced the Goddess who was worshipped by the agriculturists. So there was this great cultural transition that went on, and gradually the Goddess and the feminine side of human nature became submerged in this new patriarchal culture.
So what is the connection here with child rearing?
There's a fascinating piece of research which was carried out by an American geographer. He was very interested in climate change: but he was also interested in the links between climate change and the type of societies that existed before and after these climate changes. What he discovered was that, as climates became harsher, societies became more patriarchal, and also that they changed their methods of child rearing.
Looking back to that period of the birth of patriarchy, there were dramatic climate changes in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe, and Western Asia, with a great deal of agricultural land drying up, and a lot of people having to become nomads, and living a much harsher life. What this did was to shift society in a much more patriarchal direction, and with it came this change towards harsher child rearing practices, the idea being that you had to treat children harshly in order to produce individuals who were prepared to become warriors and hunters.
| patriarchal societies became the foundation for western civilisation |
Then when we look at mythology we find there is confirmation of that in the form of the Birth of the Hero myth. Otto Rank, who was a disciple of Freud's, discovered 67 varieties of this myth from different parts of the world, all dating from this sort of era, and all having the same basic characteristics, which are: an infant who is abandoned by its parents: the infant is raised by foster parents; the infant grows up to perform heroic deeds; the hero returns to reclaim his lost estate, and often to take revenge on the parents who abandoned him.
The Hero became the shining symbol of the new patriarchal culture. By the time of classical Greece the hero was represented in the form of the God Apollo, and lots of other mythical figures like him. But what the myth tells us is that the hero did not emerge without first having had to go through this infant abandonment, which is the mythological representation of a severe patriarchal upbringing.
It's very likely that the peaceable agricultural societies brought up their children in the same way that the hunter gatherers did whom Jean Liedloff studied, with a lot of respect for human nature, and maintaining a balance between masculine and feminine. But when the new patriarchal society came along there was a departure from the Continuum way of raising children, and a repression of the feminine side of human nature, and exaggeration of the masculine, in order to arrive at the new hero stereotype.
In other words, children had to be 'initiated' into the new patriarchal culture?
Exactly And that patriarchal initiation has been continuing ever since. Examples range from the Spartans who doused their babies in freezing cold water to toughen them up into becoming fierce warriors, right through to the unprecedentedly ferocious war that late 18th and 19th century English society waged on children in breaking their spirits and the introduction of boarding schools. Sending children away from home has always been a feature; going back to the middle ages in England it was customary for wealthy families to farm out their children to live with another family some distance away from the age of 5 onwards in order to break their family ties and toughen them up.
So what is your general view of initiation?
I take a slightly different view of male initiation from, for example, the view taken by Robert Bly in Iron John. When you look at the range of tribal societies revealed by anthropological research, one way of classifying them is on a dimension from patrist to matrist (anthropological speak for patriarchal to matriarchal). At the patrist extreme you have warrior societies, societies involved in the hunting of large animals, and societies which live in harsh environments. At the other end of the spectrum you have matrist societies, which are not involved in warring or hunting. And what you find is that the patrist societies have male initiation, and that the harsher the role of the male is in those societies, the harsher is the initiation. And at the other end of the spectrum, matrist societies do not have male initiation.
There are some conspicuous examples of matrist societies where men are not initiated, such as the traditional Tahitian culture. Now, the Bly view of initiation is that it is a psychological experience which males have to go through in order to complete themselves as men. Many anthropologists would disagree with that and argue that male initiation performs an economic, rather than a psychological, function and that it isn't essential to under-go initiation in order to become a man.
For example, in Tahiti there is rather little role differentiation between men and women, and much more of a balance between masculine and feminine, the sort of balance we were talking about earlier in the Neolithic societies. Tahitian men are not initiated, but still seem to be whole and healthy.
| the harsher the role of the male is in those societies, the harsher is the initiation |
A good friend of mine was visiting Tahiti and interviewed a number of Tahitian men. One guy she interviewed was a young man who is a political activist in reclaiming land rights from the French, who are the colonial power in Polynesia, and who have been conducting nuclear testing in Polynesia for many years. My friend asked this man what his feelings were about the French nuclear testing. He said that when the French drilled great holes in the ground and planted their weapons at the bottom he felt that he had to stand by and watch the land, which was his mother, being repeatedly raped, with their seed being planted at the bottom of this hole, and then the explosion, and the land being contaminated for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
As he was describing it he wept. Now this was the same man who had very recently paddled a canoe with three other guys 1,500 miles to another island, navigating only by the sun and the stars, to prove some of the journeys the Tahitians made thousands of years ago. So there appeared to be nothing dodgy about his manhood, and the fact that he was a political activist, reclaiming land rights, and this arduous journey he undertook, seem to indicate there was nothing wimpish about him.
This seems to me a very good example of how you can be a whole man without having been through initiation, and I think it raises serious questions about whether initiation is the only prescription for healthy manhood. Patriarchal initiation is all about putting young males through a process which divides the masculine from the feminine, and represses the feminine side and exaggerates the masculine side, so that they are ready to go out and be warriors and be hunters.
We still initiate our children, and particularly our male children, in ways which are appropriate to the kind of patriarchal society we have been for the last couple of thousand years, but which maybe we aren't any more, or which we can't afford to be any more. Because the whole business of western culture has been about taming nature, industrialising, the conquering of territory - wars have been a constant feature of our civilisation.
The effect of that is fairly disastrous ultimately, because what patriarchal initiation does, when it splits masculine from feminine in the psyche, is breed destructive energy. The rage and grief a child feels through not having its nature recognised is very often not allowed expression, and therefore gets buried, festers in the unconscious and emerges later in the form of violence and crime. Or it may be channelled by the society, which was clearly the original design: the aim is to breed warriors who will fight. Warriors need that kind of energy. It's channelled into the taming of nature, the conquering of foreign peoples.
Besides destructive energy, patriarchal initiation breeds authoritarianism and conformity, and, very importantly, it breed insensitivity, because when you have had your nature violated you have to put away your emotional sensitivity. That allows you to then grow up to treat people and young children the way you were treated. It also reduces your emotional sensitivity to violations going on around you, to the treatment of women and also makes it very difficult to empathise with other people, or to feel for what we're doing to the natural environment.
We haven't talked about what you say in the book about the process of transformation, the fourth part of the book.
What I do is divide the process of recovery from patriarchal upbringing into six stages. The first, which is probably the most important one, is recovering our consciousness of what kind of species we are. We've talked a fair bit about that. That is primarily an emotional process, because, in order to do it, we somehow have to break through to that place where we hid away our sense of our Continuum at a time when it wasn't welcome in the world. We have to rediscover that vision which we were born with, and which the Continuum Concept tells us guided our first interactions with the world and the signals we put out for recognition. If we didn't get that, then we buried that part of us, and had to go forward with the way we were expected to be.
So we have to find a way of breaking through and regaining that vision. And I'm hoping that people who will have read the first three parts of my book will have had their Continuum sense prodded at by the examples I've given of the anthropological cases and the pre-historic stuff and that that will have led them to something of a new vision of themselves. Once we have that in place, then the rest follows. The second stage of recovery is getting rid of guilt and self-blame. Guilt and self-blame are the plague for men brought up under patriarchy. Almost all of us blame ourselves for our own emotional ills, for our suffering, for our destructiveness, because that is what the culture has taught us to do, and that is the way in which the culture deals with the problem.
| patriarchal initiation, when it splits masculine from feminine in the psyche, breeds destructive energy |
It comes back to the Oedipus story. The Oedipus story is one version of the Birth of the Hero myth which we talked about before. The Oedipus story that we know comes from Sophocles, the Greek dramatist. What many people don't realise is that Sophocles made two important changes to the original myth. First, he downplayed the infant abandonment, so that, although it's retained as a dramatic device in his play, it doesn't feature significantly in the content. And the second change was to make Oedipus blame himself for his so-called crimes, which, in the original Birth of the Hero myth, would have been seen as justifiable acts of revenge for his infant abandonment. So the causal link between the abandonment and the killing of the father, for example, was cut.
These changes that Sophocles made to the myth introduced a patriarchal moral to the story because what it breaks is the link between the destructive energy, which is a feature of the patriarchal personality and the infant abandonment, which represents the patriarchal upbringing, and which created that destructive energy So, instead of making the culture responsible for creating the destructive energy it makes the individual responsible, which is symbolically represented by Oedipus blinding himself when he discovers what he has done.
This message comes through in Freud's theories, because Freud used Sophocles' version of the Oedipus myth to show that we all have destructive instincts. Any school of therapy which has a great deal of Freudian influence will carry the same message. It also comes through in the Original Sin doctrine of the Christian church.
So, coming back to the stages of transformation, once we've reacquired this vision?
The third stage of transformation follows on from that. It's about allowing the emotions which were buried through that enculturation, and which were held down by the self-blame which we put upon ourselves, to come to the surface. So there may be a whole lot of rage and grief which will want to come through when we allow that process to happen.
The fourth stage is that if we are to recover the feminine side of our nature, which got buried when we were young, we've got to make space for it. When we're in the masculine we're in our heads, and our hearts have been left behind, so we're doing, doing, doing all the time, and whether it's in the area of work, or in the area of sexuality, relationships, whatever it is, many patriarchal men are driven, and they are obsessive doers.
At some point we've got to stop; and this is a difficult thing to do, because if we do, it means that the monster is going to catch up with us. We're going to have to face a lot of the feelings we've been running away from for most of our lives. But the good news is that, when we have that Continuum-conscious vision to support us, we can deal with it. In the book I use various case studies and examples of different areas of life to help the reader understand how this can happen.
But what we do when we stop is we make space for being instead of doing, which is Stage 5. That, in a sense, is allowing the feminine to come through, and it involves going back to an early stage in our lives and re-learning what it means to play, for example, because play is all about being rather than doing: play is a very feminine activity because it's about living in the present, accepting yourself, engaging with others. And a lot of men have forgotten how to play.
| Guilt and self-blame are the plague for men brought up under patriarchy |
One of the best illustrative examples of this transformative process is Steven Spielberg's film, Hook. Hook is a version of the Peter Pan story. The hero is a middle-aged American who is an obsessive corporate executive who can't leave his work alone. He is brought to his senses, you might say, when his children disappear. He follows them and discovers that he's in the Peter Pan story and they're in Neverland, the place which Peter Pan retreated to because he was unable to face up to masculinity in a patriarchal society. And what the hero of Hook discovers is that he was once Peter Pan himself, but that he has forgotten how to do all the things Peter Pan could do: Peter Pan could fly and perform all sorts of other amazing exploits.
So the hero has to relearn how to do all these things in Neverland. And once he's relearned how to do these things, which, in a sense, is relearning how to play, then he can come back into the real world, having rescued his children, which is symbolically important, because it's becoming a child again, and then he's recovered his wholeness and he can go back into life, and you could say he's repossessed his feminine side, learnt how to be, how to play again.
So it is only when the feminine is in place that we can transform our masculinity. There are lots of myths like The Beauty and the Beast which tell us that. And transforming our masculinity is the sixth and final stage. It may involve rage turning into positive anger. It may involve destructiveness turning into constructiveness in different areas of life, through having the feminine and the masculine in our consciousness together. We find that we behave in different ways, that we discover a power we didn't have before, which is the combined power of the masculine and feminine, because once the masculine is transformed, the feminine and the masculine together are able to provide a wholeness which many of us have never experienced.
It also contributes to that sense of fulfilment and happiness which seems an intrinsic part of the lives of the Continuum people Jean Liedloff talks about.
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