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

Our Egos are like the chair of the board. And the board members are the archetypes within us. Each needs to be heard from.

And the second is getting the help we need.

We call these phenomena pseudo-events for two reasons. For one thing, with the possible exception of military initiation, these processes, though sometimes highly ritualized (especially within city gangs), more often than not initiate the boy into a kind of masculinity that is skewed, stunted, and false. It is a patriarchal “manhood,” one that is a

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

Ours is a psychological age rather than an institutional one. What used to be done for us by institutional structures and through ritual process, we now have to do inside ourselves, for ourselves. Ours is a culture of the individual rather than the collective. Our Western civilization pushes us to strike out on our own, to become, as Jung said, “in

we have to take responsibility for what we’re not responsible for.

One of the hardest things to do as a counselor or therapist is to get clients to separate their Egos from their emotions without at the same time repressing the emotions. There is a really good psychological exercise for doing this that can help; it’s called focusing, originated by Eugene Gendlin. We ask our clients, when they sense the onset of st

All the products of human creativity and human interaction are like the iron filings. We can see something of the shapes and patterns of the archetypes through these manifestations. But we can never see the “energies” themselves.

True humility, we believe, consists of two things. The first is knowing our limitations.