
Iron John

“Men have been depressed now for many years in their male and resplendent selves, depressed into dejection and almost abjection.
Robert Bly • Iron John
Enjoying ritual space, then, is an intimate and imaginative act, and enjoying such space resembles being enclosed in a bowl or in a basket.
Robert Bly • Iron John
Each child lives deep inside his or her own psychic house, or soul castle, and the child deserves the right of sovereignty inside that house. Whenever a parent ignores the child’s sovereignty, and invades, the child feels not only anger, but shame.
Robert Bly • Iron John
Exuberance in a child is bad, and at the first sign of it, parents should be severe. Exuberance implies that the wild boy or girl is no longer locked up.
Robert Bly • Iron John
A girl changes into a woman on her own, with the bodily developments marking the change; old women tell her stories and chants, and do celebrations.
Robert Bly • Iron John
Each father inherits thousands of years of cunning and elaborate fatherhood. An apparently weak father can control the entire family from beneath with his silences.
Robert Bly • Iron John
“Why are there more and more naïve men in the world?” Whether the fathers are actually darker than they were in the past, they are perceived so, and a son assigns himself the task of redeeming the dark father.
Robert Bly • Iron John
Shame, it is said, is the sense that you are an utterly inadequate person on this planet, and probably nothing can be done about it. Guilt is the sense that you have done one thing wrong, and you can atone for it.
Robert Bly • Iron John
When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, and not his teaching.