Summary of Robert Bly's Iron John

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The American man has changed over the years, and today there is no standard of what a man should be. Men are becoming more thoughtful and gentle, but they are not becoming more free.
#2 The soft male is a phenomenon that I’ve seen across the country in the seventies. These are men who are life-preserving and not life-giving. They are not interested in harming the earth or starting wars, but they are not interested in being active either.
#3 The journey many American men have taken into softness, or receptivity, or development of the feminine side has been a valuable one, but more travel lies ahead. No stage is the final stop.
#4 The mythological systems associate hair with the instinctive and the sexual and the primitive. 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.

Sujets

• Sexualité
• sexualité
• Sexualité
• Women's Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 27 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669393764
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Robert Bly's Iron John
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The American man has changed over the years, and today there is no standard of what a man should be. Men are becoming more thoughtful and gentle, but they are not becoming more free.

#2

The soft male is a phenomenon that I’ve seen across the country in the seventies. These are men who are life-preserving and not life-giving. They are not interested in harming the earth or starting wars, but they are not interested in being active either.

#3

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

#4

The mythological systems associate hair with the instinctive and the sexual and the primitive. 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.

#5

The task of modern men is to descend into the pond and accept what they find there. Some men have already done this work, and the Hairy Man has been brought up from the pond in their psyche.

#6

The Iron John story says that the golden ball lies within the magnetic field of the Wild Man, which is a very difficult concept for us to grasp. We have to accept the possibility that the true radiant energy in the male does not lie in the feminine realm, but in the magnetic field of the deep masculine.

#7

The Wild Man is not opposed to civilization, but he is not completely contained by it either. The ethical superstructure of popular Christianity does not support the Wild Man, though there is some suggestion that Christ himself did.

#8

The story says that when the King locked up the Wild Man, he gave the key into the keeping of the Queen. But we were only about seven years old at the time, and our father never told us what he had done with the key.

#9

The key to the castle is stolen by the son, who then brings it to the Wild Man’s cage. The Wild Man is free at last, and it’s clear that he will go back to his own forest, far from the castle.

#10

The boy eventually escapes from the castle, and goes off with the Wild Man. They speak for years, and the boy learns about the world and himself. But the story suggests that Iron John and the boy cannot be united in the castle courtyard, because it is too close to the mother’s pillow and the father’s book of rules.

#11

The ancient societies believed that a boy becomes a man through ritual and effort, but in our culture, there is no such moment. The boys in our culture have a continuing need for initiation into male spirit, but old men in general don’t offer it.

#12

Without old men’s labor, Western society would cease to function. Without their knowledge and experience, younger men would be lost. In the 19th century, older men spent a lot of time with younger men, and brought knowledge of male spirit and soul to them.

#13

The old men who initiated boys were able to convey to them some assurance that is nonverbal and invisible. It helped the boys see their genuine face or being. So what can be done. Thousands of women, being single parents, are raising boys without any adult man in the house.

#14

The traditional initiation break, where the son leaves the mother, is not happening anymore. This doesn’t mean that the women are doing something wrong: the problem is that the old men aren’t doing their job.

#15

The traditional way of raising sons, which lasted for thousands of years, involved fathers and sons living in close proximity while the father taught the son a trade. The Industrial Revolution pulled fathers away from their sons and placed them in compulsory schools, where they were forced to work with women.

#16

The American male’s fear that his father is evil, due to the father’s distance from him, contributed to the student takeover of Columbia University in the 1960s. The Greeks, Senecas, and other cultures have long respected a positive male energy that has accepted authority.

#17

When a son acts on his fear of demonism, he becomes flat, stale, isolated, and dry. He doesn’t know how to recover his wet and muddy portion. He begins to miss contact with men, or at least his father.