The most eye-rolling of defenses

My client, a retired physician, has always gone astray in her search for a good man. She is attracted to confident, masterful (and well-dressed) men, feeling implicitly just right to want to be taken care of and protected. I, on the other hand, a hard-working male therapist, feel manly and good to be the earner, providing a sense of security for my wife.

Here we are, two of the billions of adequately intelligent people who marched brainwashed into the right belief system bequeathed to us by history and television, the stalwart man and the limp starry-eyed woman.

This may be a stretch (I don’t think so), but I suspect that even the sweetest guys and the toughest women harbor, beneath their Freudian preconscious, these same ego-syntonic* and delicious urges: protectee and protector. Ayn Rand, most adamantine of women with her “virtue of selfishness,” her casting deviators from her Objectivist philosophy into the fire, her apotheosis of atheism and capitalism and her deification of rationality, believed that the essence of femininity is male hero-worship and therefore that a woman should never be, for example, president of the United States.

I think it’s valid to ask if these stereotypes (or archetypes**) are fundamentally right or fundamentally wrong. Can there actually be something instinctively “looking up” (at a man) in the female genome, something “looking down” in boys’ and men’s? What if world history has simply perpetuated certain self-medicating defense mechanisms as prosthetic egos when real self-esteem is lacking? “Boys better than girls” no different than "men superior to women" no different than “Whites superior to Blacks,” no different than Jews more “chosen” than you,*** no different than parents better than their children?

If we look to depth psychology – the terrible place where we are all still three years old, the inner child crawling wounded from infancy to grave – we’ll find that my client's and women's need to need is half right and that men's script of superiority is all wrong. How? The women have allowed themselves, maybe unconsciously, to feel dependency, the unfinished child’s rightness to have someone to lean on, to collapse to, to look to for wisdom, the eternal bond to the perfect(-seeming) Mother or Father. Where women have erred is in accepting that it is the opposite sex, rather than the Platonic parent, who stands on a pedestal in their DNA.

The emotionally ingenious men who can feel this dependency in themselves will be holistically cleared of a poisonous obstruction in their lives, the conceit of macho godliness. They will be rid of a delusion that slowly breaks their backs, warps their spirit, and cuts short their lives. Ayn Rand was right about this: These false Atlases need to shrug. She didn’t know that they need to fall into their mother’s arms, in fact or memory or loss.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* “Ego-syntonic” – basically meaning “in harmony with one's dysfunction.” For example, someone with Major Depressive Disorder doesn't like being depressed. But a Depressive Personality-disordered person is ego-syntonically fine to be miserable, morose, pessimistic, sure that the future will be as bleak as the past and present.

** Carl Jung conceived a few archetypes embodying traditional male and female roles, such as the hero, the great mother, the wise old man, the maiden, the anima and animus.

*** TPS is of Jewish lineage and therefore feels that he has standing to make objective comments about the tradition.