I haven't read the book, but I find the genre of archetypal and mythopoetic men's "soul" literature an interesting psycho-social phenomenon. I agree that a deeper focus on the "soul" of men needs to be made, but I think we struggle culturally to figure out how to do this. Most fascinating to me is the great resistance that, for instance Robert Bly, received for his Iron John and Men's Movement stuff. Skepticism and challenging of Bly are understandable and appropriate, but some of the responses he received (from both men and women) were vicious and nearly psychopathic. It was as if the very idea that men should attempt to do some "soul work" was itself condemnable. It was a "complexed" reaction, but I'm not sure I understand the finer details of the complex.
One thing I do sort of agree with Bly about is that men's masculine "souls" (here I really mean the heroic attitude as it is expressed in men) even in our modern patriarchy are actually in worse shape than women's. If this is in any way valid, it may be best observed through a Jungian lens . . . with its idea that the "souls" of women are masculine (animus). I'm not sure if that metaphor is the best we can come up with, but I think the gist of it is that even when men are the perpetrators of abuses on women and others in general, damage is also being done to the image of masculinity that has been introjected into all people living under patriarchy. This patriarchal introject is equivalent to what I call the Demon.
In this postmodern era, we have begun to realize that patriarchal masculinity is Demonic, and that its claims to "heroism" are not entirely (or perhaps even remotely) valid. That heroism is colored by the abuse of the other (however that other is defined). Therefore, the postmodern egoic mindset (especially among more educated people . . . who may be more "postmodernized") is decidedly anti-heroic. We have lost faith in the patriarchal culture hero . . . and by extension we have lost faith in masculinity (which had always been largely defined by that patriarchal heroism). The masculine has fallen into the shadow, perhaps as the personal shadow that had always been abused by the patriarchal Demon. In our era, many people's ego identities have been constructed in a way that promotes the imprisonment and abuse of the masculine shadow by the Patriarchal Demon. In order for many postmoderns to be what they are and to maintain their introjected gender constructions, masculinity has to remain enshadowed. Where it dares to rear its head or is acknowledged non-condemningly, we are in danger of becoming possessed by the Demon and taking on its obsession with abuse of the shadow. Sometimes this Demonic shadow-abuse is allowed to be cleansed under the name of "feminism" (as was the case in the 80s when Bly was vigorously attacked by self-proclaimed male and female "feminists").
This adoption of the patriarchal Demon is a problem feminism has wrestled with unsuccessfully. Even where women "inherit the Earth", what are they really inheriting? Women who have risen to power have not, by and large, transformed that power into something "feminine". Power has not been feminized, powerful women have more typically been patriarchalized. It turned out to be quite the devil's bargain. Many feminist women today have chosen to turn away from the patriarchal world of work and return to the "traditionally female" role of child-rearing . . . and this is often seen as an expression of feminism.
An interesting artifact of today's culture is the rise of the female hero in the popular imagination. Many movies, TV shows and books have adopted female heroes and superheros. In Japanese anime, female superheroes are abundant. Many are depicted as tough and violent assassins or demon-killing machines while also being very sexy and appealing to male fantasy (especially the femme fatale fantasy). The femme fatale is the man-killer. She rises up from hell to punish men for their sins (one of them being lust). An interesting take on this figure can be found in the Swedish film
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (and the subsequent installments of that trilogy). The author of the books on which the films were based, Stieg Larsson, claimed he was driven to write these books and create the protagonist partly as an act of repentance. "When Larsson was 15 years old, he witnessed the gang rape of a girl, which led to his lifelong abhorrence of violence and abuse against women. The author never forgave himself for failing to help the girl, whose name was Lisbeth – like the young heroine of his books, who is also a rape victim." [
Wikipedia] The first book and movie was actually called (in Swedish)
Men Who Hate Women.
I'm not implying that men should not repent for their associations with patriarchy and especially its abuses of the other. I mean merely to note that various forms of this repentance are cropping up in the popular imagination. In the films based on Larsson's novels (and in those novels themselves, I would presume), most of the men are hideously evil, and this evil is contrasted with the male hero character, Mikael Blomkvist (who is a true other-valuating hero like those we might see in fairytales). But just as most men are not as evil as the evil men in the films, most men are not as gentle and accepting of otherness as Blomkvist. My wife was actually the first to notice this disparity in the film's male characters when we watched the first film (perhaps because she is less a fan of the male white knight type . . . with the exception of me, of course
).
In many popular creative works, the image of masculinity (especially as associated with patriarchal ideals) is being exploded or deflated. But a functional, revised image of masculinity is not being constructed to replace it. Blomkvist is a valuator, and that is a step in the right direction, but I would argue that his spotlessness is a male repentance fantasy, "If only I could be like this Mikael Blomkvist, then I would be free of my sins and shadow!" Perhaps more importantly, I think this white knight masculine derives from the male imagination rather than the female. To many women, I suspect that Mikael Blomkvist is a bit of a non-entity who has no distinct shape, no flesh, no numinousness. In the films, Blomkvist is a facilitator of his Lisbeth Salander anima, but it should be noted that Lisbeth Salander is a severely damaged person with very limited ability for relationship or intimacy (although understandably, due to her horrible history of traumas). Blomkvist is part lover, part good-father/mentor for Lisbeth. An anima figure that can kill and avenge injustice but can't relate is not really whole. Sensing this, Blomkvist is like a psychoanalytic "good breast" for Lisbeth, allowing her to do whatever she wants (relationally) without reproach. At times, Lisbeth seems touched by his open-heartedness, but she doesn't seem transformed or healed by it.
I don't know what the solution would be, what would heal someone so massively destroyed, but the fact that she is a bleeding wound even with the best the male hero can do to "contain" her volatility and pain suggests that there would have to be future developments as yet unimagined (and of course, Larsson himself is dead, these novels were published posthumously). I suspect that splitting off the Demonic patriarchal masculine and turning its deadly aggression on it with one hand (Salander) while repenting chastely with the other (Blomkvist) is not enough. There is too much fracture in this scenario for Lisbeth-as-anima to ever be truly healed. Whatever the solution may be is more complex, more gray (rather than black and white).
At the same time postmodern men (like Larsson) are struggling to conjure up a post-patriarchal heroic masculine, postmodern women are struggling to develop relationships with their enshadowed animus figures. It is extremely difficult for postmodern women to trust the masculine animus Other. The result of this difficulty is an estrangement from the Self that accompanies postmodern cultural constructions of women's identities. We can see this writ large in Jungian culture and thought, where the animus figure is commonly held to be negative and shadowy. Whether in men or in women, a healthy and functional image of masculinity is not to be readily found. This is all a logical trend in reaction to recent consciousness of the Demonic aspects of patriarchy, but what to do about it? I really don't know. I can only feel that this masculine "soul" is unwell and that it should not be rejected or despised, but treated, and if possible, healed.
