20 Jan The Seven Male Attributes (ALON GRATCH) | Part C’
The fourth male attribute, Self-Involvement (see me, hear me, touch me, feel me), is a direct derivative or one possible outcome of the conflict of masculine insecurity. Merely knowing one is a man is not enough protection against one’s own feminine desires — one has to also demonstrate it repeatedly to oneself. But even that’s not enough: one also has to show it in Technicolor to the rest of the world.
Obviously, women too need to be seen, recognized, and admired. But whereas female narcissism often reflects our society’s interest in physical appearance, beauty, and aesthetics, male narcissism is more about our obsession with strength, power, and achievement. What greed is to capitalism, narcissism is to personal growth. Healthy, even excessive self-love is the psychic engine for courage and achievement. In its expansiveness and eagerness to please, it even creates generosity.
But narcissism has a bad name for a reason. One acquaintance, a highly successful surgeon, casually told me in front of his wife and teenage children, “In the past fifteen years I’ve cared about nothing except my career, not even my wife and children.” It is this kind of brutal honesty that leads us to assume that the main problem with the self-centered narcissist is his lack of regard for others. But interestingly, this kind of man always ends up hurting himself. We all know someone like that: a man in his fifties or sixties who is confronted by, or trying to avoid confronting, the tragic sense that after devoting his life to being the best provider to his family, he now feels estranged from his wife and alienated from his children.
Sometimes, the irony of the narcissistic defeat does not afford the person any success. One patient was a talented actor who, over the years, performed in several Off-Broadway shows. He always received excellent reviews and was therefore completely mystified as to why he could never quite make it in a big way. To me, it was fairly obvious. In his interactions with producers, directors, and other actors he had always put work or career considerations ahead of all and any social concerns. The only thing that mattered to him was being on center stage — literally. Therefore, while everybody recognized his talent, nobody wanted to work with him a second time.
The Greek figure of Icarus defied his father’s admonition by flying too close to the sun. His wax wings melted and he fell into the sea. In his quest to feel good about himself, the daring, oblivious, self-centered man sets out to defy reality. His eventual fall, therefore, marks the all-important psychological meeting place of narcissism and masochism. For many men the accumulation of wealth and its outward manifestations are sufficient evidence of self-value. But others seek to enhance their self-esteem by testing the limits of their most fragile asset — the human body. Such men may engage in sexual activities with great youthful exuberance, not for purposes of intimacy, but as a means of conquering the fear of aging and decay. So much like man’s primordial fantasy of flying, the male sexual pursuit can serve to deny our limitations and to bolster our illusion of immortality.
Notwithstanding its lofty existential origins, this dynamic presents many practical problems. For starters, denying our mortality only brings it closer to us. This is all too apparent in the tendency of young men to feel invincible and to engage in such risky behaviors as smoking, fighting, and driving under the influence. The “unsinkable” Titanic is another example of the possible outcome of this type of male arrogance. In the sexual realm, when an older man has an affair with a young woman in order to borrow her youthfulness, chances are he ends up feeling like a “dirty old man.”
Resolving conflicts arising from men’s self-involvement is critical to having successful relationships with men — at the work-place or in the love space. In trying to do so, I believe, much can be learned from the therapist who complements his empathic acceptance of the self-involved man with a confrontation of his grandiose defenses. Loving someone for who he is and admiring his real achievements mandate that we also reject and attack his exaggerated sense of self-importance.
The fifth male element, Aggression (I’ll show you who’s boss) is also a natural outcome of the conflict of masculine insecurity. As any marital therapist knows, one of the most common presenting marital problems is the dynamic of the angry, critical, or explosive husband with the wounded, tearful, and defeated wife. In this dynamic, the man’s aggression serves to (1) intimidate the “opponent” and catch her off guard, (2) violate her psychic, if not physical, space in order to penetrate and occupy it, and (3) create a wall of bitterness which will psychologically separate him from her. In all three tactics we can clearly see traces of man’s fear of losing himself in a woman, a powerful fear which is also an equally powerful wish.
As I have said, this conflict, between the wish to be (with) a woman and the fear of losing one’s masculine identity is at the heart of the conflict of masculine insecurity.
As with masculine insecurity, the key to coping with male aggression is balance. We must respect emphatic if insensitive male assertion and respond in kind, but reject sadistic, though remorseful, male destructiveness.
How to tell the difference between the two is a problem for many women. Some are so used to aggression that they collude with each sequence of abuse-remorse-good behavior-abuse-remorse-good behavior as if it’s not going to happen more than twice. Others are so fearful of any sign of male aggression that they cannot see the strength and protection it may one day offer them.
One patient came to see me for a consultation about his explosive anger at his wife. Among other things, he told me that he had had temper tantrums as a child and had always been impatient. At the end of the second session, on his way out, he asked, “So does this help?” In responding, I first said, somewhat defensively, “I don’t know, you tell me.” But then, smiling warmly (because I liked him), I added, “Let me tell you what I really think. I think what you are saying is, ‘This doesn’t help,’ but I think that’s just you throwing a tantrum. You really are impatient.” I thus met his aggression with mine, which preempted him from devaluing me as a “softy.” But at the same time, the warmth and caring in my tone disarmed him of his need to protect himself with a counterattack.
In an intimate relationship, the same applies: the man needs to feel free to dispatch some aggression without fearing that his partner will be destroyed. His partner, therefore, must respond with her own aggression so as to set the limits of what’s acceptable. But literally at the same time, she must also try to disarm him with genuine care and affection.
When men are fundamentally and completely incapable of expressing aggression toward others, they turn on themselves. This is what the sixth male attribute, Self-Destructiveness (I’m such a loser), is all about. One patient, a warm and charming young ophthalmologist, started therapy because he was unable to form a lasting intimate relationship good enough for marriage. While he was professionally successful, he felt extremely unhappy about his inability to commit to a woman. After a few weeks of therapy, he was feeling so frustrated with his lack of progress that his frustration and helplessness began to “contaminate” our relationship. Just then, as I was beginning to feel frustrated and helpless myself, the patient had a dream in which I was an insecure, “weak” tour guide with an eye problem. And he, the patient, was one of the tourists in my group and was called upon to treat me.
In my mind, the fact that I “caught” his helplessness and became “weakened,” suggested that this was precisely the unconscious intention of his frustration. If this makes no sense, think of the power an unhappy child has over his parent’s happiness — self-destructiveness is a way of getting back at the other by depriving oneself. If I have a vision problem, how will I guide my patient?
Another way to look at it is that the patient didn’t feel “seen” by me, and that his frustration and helplessness were an attempt to correct my vision. As it turned out, this patient felt that he was living the life inscribed for him by his father, and that the only way to say no to him (or to be seen as his own person) was to become “a loser,” at least in the sense of not following his father’s footsteps into marriage. Viewed in that light, frustrating and destroying me — the presumed therapeutic representative of the marriage agenda — was only a logical if irrational step. And this is the essence of self-destructiveness. We’d rather curse the darkness than light one candle. That will show them.
This powerful dynamic is often at the center of the psychology of such self-destructive conditions as addictive and compulsive syndromes, professional failure, accident proneness, and high-risk, reckless behavior. But it is also to be found in less dramatic problems such as making poor financial decisions, being in a dead-end job, arriving late for job interviews, bouncing checks, speaking without thinking, lying and getting caught, not paying attention, burning the toast, burning the kitchen towel — and, as anyone who has ever dealt with men knows, the list goes on and on.
In their zeal to help self-destructive men, many therapists (like well-intended parents and spouses) learn the hard way how the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Depending on the circumstances, trying to save someone from the brink of self-destruction can be counterproductive and painful. Even the small ways in which men experience themselves as losers are frustrating. The trick is to treat it as a form of aggression against you, which can leave you in an impossible situation. Do you hang in there with a policy of constructive engagement, or do you walk away? Whatever you do, do not assume responsibility for his behavior. This is true if you are a therapist, a girlfriend, or a spouse: if you are a backseat driver, your man will never learn to drive safely.
Finally, if men were truly mute they would communicate through sex. Indeed, for most men, everything is about sex, except sex, which often enough is about shame, emotional absence, masculine insecurity, self-involvement, aggression, and self-destructiveness. Sexual Acting-Out (I want sex now), the seventh male attribute, presents a dramatic condensation and a summary of all the previous elements. As you can see, I ended up with male sexuality, just where I started in my original seminar. The reason is simple. The sexual arena is where men naturally play out emotional conflicts which, ultimately, are not about sex after all.
One startling example: a patient who was emotionally distant but very kind to his girlfriend could be aroused only by fantasies of rape — the absent emotion of rage was only present in his sexual fantasies. Thus, while the content of men’s sexual fantasies may suggest a variety of strong feelings, most of what they consciously experience when aroused is sexual desire.
The good news is that the male sexual language is not entirely foreign. It is more like a dialect, but one which can and should be deciphered by both women and men. One patient came to therapy because he would lose his erection when he was about to penetrate his wife. He had no trouble in any other sexual situation or fantasy. In one of the first sessions he presented a dream in which I, as his therapist, prescribed that he insert a banana in his rectum. When he carried out my prescription, the banana penetrated him deeply and came out on the other side, through his penis, which then became hardened and strong. The patient, who had no conscious sexual attraction to men, was worried that the dream could represent a homosexual wish.
That was a definite possibility, but I took it to mean that what he needed in order to function as a man was a soft yet powerful dose of masculinity. Ultimately, only he could inject himself with such a serum. But others, primarily his therapist, could certainly facilitate his growth as a man. In this case, as in so many others, the patient’s wife played an important therapeutic role. In her own feminine way, she helped her husband to express his feelings — or, in other words, to talk more like a woman but to act more like a man. And that is the royal road to a man’s heart.
If Men Could Talk: Translating the Secret Language of Men
Alon Gratch
