King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

compassion, clarity of vision, and generativity. A second factor makes most initiations in our culture pseudo-initiations. In most cases, there simply is not a contained ritual process. Ritual process is contained by two things. The first is sacred space and the second is a ritual elder, a “wise old man” or a “wise old woman” who is completely trus

Our own culture has pseudo-rituals instead. There are many pseudo-initiations for men in our culture. Conscription into the military is one. The fantasy is that the humiliation and forced nonidentity of boot camp will “make a man out of you.” The gangs of our major cities are another manifestation of pseudo-initiation and so are the prison systems,

For every child, from a developmental point of view, Mother is the goddess and Father is the god. Boys who are too bound to the Mother get hurt.

The Precocious Child is the origin of our curiosity and our adventurous impulses.

It can be said that life’s perhaps most fundamental dynamic is the attempt to move from a lower form of experience and consciousness to a higher (or deeper) level of consciousness, from a diffuse identity to a more consolidated and structured identity.

The drug dealer, the ducking and diving political leader, the wife beater, the chronically “crabby” boss, the “hot shot” junior executive, the unfaithful husband, the company “yes man,” the indifferent graduate school adviser, the “holier than thou” minister, the gang member, the father who can never find the time to attend his daughter’s school pr

Jung and his successors have found that on the level of the deep unconscious the psyche of every person is grounded in what Jung called the “collective unconscious,” made up of instinctual patterns and energy configurations probably inherited genetically throughout the generations of our species. These archetypes provide the very foundations of our

There’s a saying in psychology that we have to take responsibility for what we’re not responsible for. This means that we are not responsible (as no infant is) for what happened to us to stunt us and to fixate us in our early years when our personalities were formed and when we got stuck at immature levels of masculinity. Yet it does us no good to

Archetypal patterns gone awry, skewed into the negative by disastrous encounters with living people in the outer world—that is, in most cases, by inadequate or hostile parents—manifest in our lives as crippling psychological problems. If our parents were, as the psychologist D. W. Winnicott says, “good enough,” then we are enabled to experience and