Robert Bly

It takes awhile for a son to overcome these early negative views of the father. The psyche holds on tenaciously to these early perceptions. Idealization of the mother or obsession with her, liking her or hating her, may last until the son is thirty, or thirty-five, forty. Somewhere around forty or forty-five a movement toward the father takes place naturally—a desire to see him more clearly and to draw closer to him. This happens unexplainably, almost as if on a biological timetable

Now I can die.’” Fathers wait. What else can they do

I am not saying that all fathers are good; mothers can be right about the father’s negative side, but the woman also can be judgmental about masculine traits that are merely different or unexpected

If the son learns feeling primarily from the mother, then he will probably see his own

masculinity from the feminine point of view as well

Eventually a man needs to throw off all indoctrination and begin to discover for himself what the father is and what masculinity is

For that task, ancient stories are a good help, because they are free of modern psychological prejudices, because they have endured the scrutiny of generations of women and men, and because they give both the light and dark sides of manhood, the admirable and the dangerous. Their model is not a perfect

man, nor an overly spiritual man

When a man gets in touch with the Wild Man, a true strength may be added. He’s able to shout and say what he wants in a way that the Sixties-Seventies man is not able to. The approach to, or embodying of, receptive space that the Sixties-Seventies man has achieved is infinitely valuable, and not to be given up. But as

Women in the 1970s needed to develop what is known in the Indian tradition as Kali energy—the ability really to say what they want, to dance with skulls around their neck, to cut relationships when they need to