Iron John: A Book about Men

by Robert Bly

The knowledge of how to build a nest in a bare tree, how to fly to the wintering place, how to perform the mating dance—all of this information is stored in the reservoirs of the bird’s instinctual brain. But human beings, sensing how much flexibility they might need in meeting new situations, decided to store this sort of knowledge outside the instinctual system; they stored it in stories. Stories, then—fairy stories, legends, myths, hearth stories—amount to a reservoir where we keep new ways of responding that we can adopt when the conventional and current ways wear out.

Some of the great students of this reservoir in recent centuries have been George Groddeck, Gurdjieff, Carl Jung, Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell, and Georges Dumezil. My first teacher in unfolding the fairy story was Marie-Louise von Franz, and I have tried to be as true to the masculine stories as she has been to the feminine in her many books.

Even in our own era the agreed-on model has changed dramatically. During the fifties, for example, an American character appeared with some consistency that became a model of manhood adopted by many men: the Fifties male. He got to work early, labored responsibly, supported his wife and children, and admired discipline. Reagan is a sort of mummified version of this dogged type. This sort of man didn’t see women’s souls well, but he appreciated their bodies; and his view of culture and America’s part in it was boyish and optimistic. Many of his qualities were strong and positive, but underneath the charm and bluff there was, and there remains, much isolation, deprivation, and passivity. Unless he has an enemy, he isn’t sure that he is alive. The Fifties man was supposed to like football, be aggressive, stick up for the United States, never cry, and always provide. But receptive space or intimate space was missing in this image of a man. The personality lacked some sense of flow. The psyche lacked compassion in a way that encouraged the unbalanced pursuit of the Vietnam war, just as, later, the lack of what we might call “garden” space inside Reagan’s head led to his callousness and brutality toward the powerless in El Salvador, toward old people here, the unemployed, schoolchildren, and poor people in general.

During the sixties, another sort of man appeared. The waste and violence of the Vietnam war made men question whether they knew what an adult male really was. If manhood meant Vietnam, did they want any part of it? Meanwhile, the feminist movement encouraged men to actually look at women, forcing them to become conscious of concerns and sufferings that the Fifties male labored to avoid. As men began to examine women’s history and women’s sensibility, some men began to notice what was called their feminine side and pay attention to it. This process continues to this day, and I would say that most contemporary men are involved in it in some way. There’s something wonderful about this development—I mean the practice of men welcoming their own “feminine” consciousness and nurturing it—this is important—and yet I have the sense that there is something wrong. The male in the past twenty years has become more thoughtful, more gentle. But by this process he has not become more free. He’s a nice boy who pleases not only his mother but also the young woman he is living with.

In the seventies I began to see all over the country a phenomenon that we might call the “soft male.” Sometimes even today when I look out at an audience, perhaps half the young males are what I’d call soft. They’re lovely, valuable people—I like them—they’re not interested in harming the earth or starting wars. There’s a gentle attitude toward life in their whole being and style of living. But many of these men are not happy. You quickly notice the lack of energy in them. They are life-preserving but not exactly life-giving. Ironically, you often see these men with strong women who positively radiate energy. Here we have a finely tuned young man, ecologically superior to his father, sympathetic to the whole harmony of the universe, yet he himself has little vitality to offer.

Part of their grief rose out of remoteness from their fathers, which they felt keenly, but partly, too, grief flowed from trouble in their marriages or relationships. They had learned to be receptive, but receptivity wasn’t enough to carry their marriages through troubled times. In every relationship something fierce is needed once in a while: both the man and the woman need to have it. But at the point when it was needed, often the young man came up short. He was nurturing, but something else was required—for his relationship, and for his life. The “soft” male was able to say, “I can feel your pain, and I consider your life as important as mine, and I will take care of you and comfort you.” But he could not say what he wanted, and stick by it. Resolve of that kind was a different matter.

The journey many American men have taken into softness, or receptivity, or “development of the feminine side,” has been an immensely valuable journey, but more travel lies ahead. No stage is the final stop.

When a contemporary man looks down into his psyche, he may, if conditions are right, find under the water of his soul, lying in an area no one has visited for a long time, an ancient hairy man. The mythological systems associate hair with the instinctive and the sexual and the primitive. What I’m suggesting, then, is that every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.

The Iron John story proposes that the golden ball lies within the magnetic field of the Wild Man, which is a very hard concept for us to grasp. We have to accept the possibility that the true radiant energy in the male does not hide in, reside in, or wait for us in the feminine realm, nor in the macho/John Wayne realm, but in the magnetic field of the deep masculine. It is protected by the instinctive one who’s underwater and who has been there we don’t know how long.

The first step amounts to approaching the cage and asking for the golden ball back. Some men are ready to take that step, while others haven’t yet bucketed the water out of the pond—they haven’t left the collective male identity and gone out into the unknown area alone, or gone with only their dog.

Jung remarked that all successful requests to the psyche involve deals. The psyche likes to make deals.

The means of getting the key back varies with each man, but suffice it to say that democratic or nonlinear approaches will not carry the day. One rather stiff young man danced one night for about six hours, vigorously, and in the morning remarked, “I got some of the key back last night.” Another man regained the key when he acted like a wholehearted Trickster for the first time in his life, remaining fully conscious of the tricksterism. Another man stole the key when he confronted his family and refused to carry any longer the shame for the whole family.

Among the Hopis and other native Americans of the Southwest, the old men take the boy away at the age of twelve and bring him down into the all-male area of the kiva. He stays down there for six weeks, and does not see his mother again for a year and a half. The fault of the nuclear family today isn’t so much that it’s crazy and full of double binds (that’s true in communes and corporate offices too—in fact, in any group). The fault is that the old men outside the nuclear family no longer offer an effective way for the son to break his link with his parents without doing harm to himself. The ancient societies believed that a boy becomes a man only through ritual and effort—only through the “active intervention of the older men.”

The traditional initiation break clearly is preferable, and sidesteps the violence. But all over the country now one sees hulking sons acting ugly in the kitchen and talking rudely to their mothers, and I think it’s an attempt to make themselves unattractive. If the old men haven’t done their work to interrupt the mother-son unity, what else can the boys do to extricate themselves but to talk ugly? It’s quite unconscious and there’s no elegance in it at all. A clean break from the mother is crucial, but it’s simply not happening. This doesn’t mean that the women are doing something wrong: I think the problem is more that the older men are not really doing their job.

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, the love unit most damaged by the Industrial Revolution has been the father-son bond.

H. Lawrence described what this was like in his essay “Men Must Work and Women as Well.” His generation in the coal-mining areas of Britain felt the full force of that change, and the new attitude centered on one idea: that physical labor is bad. Lawrence recalls that his father, who had never heard this theory, worked daily in the mines, enjoyed the camaraderie with the other men, came home in good spirits, and took his bath in the kitchen. But around that time the new schoolteachers arrived from London to teach Lawrence and his classmates that physical labor is low and unworthy and that men and women should strive to move upward to a more “spiritual” level—higher work, mental work. The children of his generation deduced that their fathers had been doing something wrong all along, that men’s physical work is wrong and that those sensitive mothers who prefer white curtains and an elevated life are right and always have been.

There’s a general assumption now that every man in a position of power is or will soon be corrupt and oppressive. Yet the Greeks understood and praised a positive male energy that has accepted authority. They called it Zeus energy, which encompasses intelligence, robust health, compassionate decisiveness, good will, generous leadership. Zeus energy is male authority accepted for the sake of the community. The native Americans believe in that healthful male power. Among the Senecas, the chief—a man, but chosen by the women—accepts power for the sake of the community. He himself owns virtually nothing. All the great cultures except ours preserve and have lived with images of this positive male energy. Zeus energy has been steadily disintegrating decade after decade in the United States.

Jung said something disturbing about this complication. He said that when the son is introduced primarily by the mother to feeling, he will learn the female attitude toward masculinity and take a female view of his own father and of his own masculinity.

A friend told me how that movement took place in his life. At about thirty-five, he began to wonder who his father really was. He hadn’t seen his father in about ten years. He flew out to Seattle, where his father was living, knocked on the door, and when his father opened the door, said, “I want you to understand one thing. I don’t accept my mother’s view of you any longer.” “What happened?” I asked. “My father broke into tears, and said, ‘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.

It is good that the divine is associated with the Virgin Mary and a blissful Jesus, but we can sense how different it would be for young men if we lived in a culture where the divine also was associated with mad dancers, fierce fanged men, and a being entirely underwater, covered with hair.

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.

Our story says that the first step is to find the Wild Man lying at the bottom of the pond. Some men are able to descend to that place through accumulated grief. However, connecting with this Kala energy will have the effect also of meeting that same energy in women. If men don’t do that, they won’t survive. Men are suffering right now—young men especially. Now that so many men have gotten in touch with their grief, their longing for father and mentor connections, we are more ready to start seeing the Wild Man and to look again at initiation. But I feel very hopeful. At this point, many things can happen.

Robert Moore said, “If you’re a young man and you’re not being admired by an older man, you’re being hurt.”

Being lied to by older men amounts to a broken leg. When the young men arrived in Vietnam and found that they had been lied to, they received immeasurably deep wounds. Never being welcomed into the male world by older men is a wound in the chest. The police chief of Detroit remarked that the young men he arrests not only don’t have any responsible older man in the house, they have never met one.

Contemporary business life allows competitive relationships only, in which the major emotions are anxiety, tension, loneliness, rivalry, and fear. After work what do men do? Collect in a bar to hold light conversations over light beer, unities which are broken off whenever a young woman comes by or touches the brim of someone’s cowboy hat. Having no soul union with other men can be the most damaging wound of all. These wounds come into us whether we honor our parents or not, whether we are good or bad. Most of them we can describe as wounds to our grandiosity. When we are tiny we have the feeling that we are God.

The recovery of some form of initiation is essential to the culture. The United States has undergone an unmistakable decline since 1950, and I believe that if we do not find a third road besides the two mentioned here, the decline will continue. We have the grandiose road, taken by junk-bond dealers, high rollers, and the owners of private jets; and we have the depressed road, taken by some long-term alcoholics, single mothers below the poverty line, crack addicts, and fatherless men.

The people who are wholeheartedly devoted to infantile grandiosity—the Wall Street man, the New Age harp player—why should they go with the Wild Man? They imagine themselves to be the Wild Man already—they are the latest thing in wildness, able to stay up all night playing with their computers, or able to think nonpolluting thoughts for four days running.

Kabir says: We sense there is some sort of spirit that loves birds and the animals and the ants— Perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother’s womb. Is it logical you would be walking around entirely orphaned now? The truth is you turned away yourself, And decided to go into the dark alone.

When the boy in our story then inadvertently dislodges one hair that falls into the spring, and it turns to gold, we could say he learns these things: that sexual energy is good; that the hunting instinct, which mammals possess without shame, is good; that animal heat, fierceness, and passionate spontaneity is good; and that excess, extravagance, and going with Pan out beyond the castle boundaries is good too.

Men have been loved for their astonishing initiative: embarking on wide oceans, starting a farm in rocky country from scratch, imagining a new business, doing it skillfully, working with beginnings, doing what has never been done. Young Viking men sometimes trained themselves by walking on the ends of the oars while the rowers continued rowing. Women, until recent times, have not been praised for their activity. They have been asked for centuries to live in an enforced passivity, demanded of them by monks, doctors, philosophers, moralists, theologians, and judges. Women are coming out into activity just as the men are passing them going the other way, into passivity.

During the last thirty years men have been asked to learn how to go with the flow, how to follow rather than lead, how to live in a nonhierarchical way, how to be vulnerable, how to adopt consensus decision-making. Some women want a passive man if they want a man at all; the church wants a tamed man—they are called priests; the university wants a domesticated man—they are called tenure-track people; the corporation wants a team-worker, and so on.

Maggy Scarf remarks in Intimate Partners that three-quarters or so of American marriages follow a curious scenario: the woman wants more intimacy and the man flees from that; she runs after, but not quite fast enough to catch him, and he flees but not quite fast enough to get away. This game can go on for years. The passive man may not say what he wants, and the girlfriend or wife has to guess it. As a compensation for passivity at home, he may go into robot production at work, but that isn’t really what he wants either.

A woman does not want a man to tell her what to do, but other forces may have turned her away from a fruitful action or act. If her husband sees this happening, he should tell her about it. A man hopes a woman will tell him as well, if she sees him accepting the direction of invisible forces.

Earlier in this chapter we spoke of some characteristics of the naïve man, among them the agreement not to look at the dark side, the assumption that everyone speaks from the heart, an inappropriate relation to ecstasy, the failure to notice that some part of him wants to remain sick, and so on. My guess is that at every point where we have one of those naïvetés, we will eventually find a katabasis to correspond with it.

As I’ve participated in men’s gatherings since the early 1980s, I’ve heard one statement over and over from American males, which has been phrased in a hundred different ways: “There is not enough father.” The sentence implies that father is a substance like salt, which in earlier times was occasionally in short supply, or like groundwater, which in some areas now has simply disappeared.

Geoffrey Gorer remarked in his book The American People that for a boy to become a man in the United States in 1940 only one thing was required: namely, that he reject his father. He noticed, moreover, that American fathers expect to be rejected. Young men in Europe, by contrast, have traditionally imagined the father to be a demonic being whom they must wrestle with (and the son in Kafka’s “The Judgment” does wrestle his father to the death and loses). Many sons in the United States, however, visualize the father as a simple object of ridicule to be made fun of, as, in fact, he is so often in comic strips and television commercials. One young man summed it up: “A father is a person who rustles newspapers in the living room.”

Traditional cultures still in existence seem to have plenty of father. In so-called traditional cultures, many substitute fathers work with the young man. Uncles loosen the son up, or tell him about women. Grandfathers give him stories. Warrior types teach weaponry and discipline, old men teach ritual and soul—all of them honorary fathers.

When a father and son do spend long hours together, which some fathers and sons still do, we could say that a substance almost like food passes from the older body to the younger. The contemporary mind might want to describe the exchange between father and son as a likening of attitude, a miming, but I think a physical exchange takes place, as if some substance was passing directly to the cells.

Slowly, over months or years, that son’s body-strings begin to resonate to the harsh, sometimes demanding, testily humorous, irreverent, impatient, opinionated, forward-driving, silence-loving older masculine body. Both male and female cells carry marvelous music, but the son needs to resonate to the masculine frequency as well as to the female frequency.

In our time, when the father shows up as an object of ridicule (as he does, as we’ve noted, on television), or a fit field for suspicion (as he does in Star Wars), or a bad-tempered fool (when he comes home from the office with no teaching), or a weak puddle of indecision (as he stops inheriting kingly radiance), the son has a problem. How does he imagine his own life as a man? Some sons fall into a secret despair. They have probably adopted, by the time they are six, their mother’s view of their father, and by twenty will have adopted society’s critical view of fathers, which amounts to a dismissal. What can they do but ask women for help? That request is not all bad. But even the best-intentioned women cannot give what is needed. Some father-hungry sons embody a secret despair they do not even mention to women. Without actually investigating their own personal father and why he is as he is, they fall into a fearful hopelessness, having fully accepted the generic, diminished idea of father. “I am the son of defective male material, and I’ll probably be the same as he is.” Then, with this secret they give up, collapse, live with a numb place inside, feel compelled to be dark because the father is dark. They lose the vigorous participation in political battles, so characteristic of nineteenth-century men in the United States, feel their opinions do not matter, become secret underground people, and sometimes drown themselves in alcohol while living in a burrow under the earth.