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July
Your Ego Is Not the Villain
The key to Optimal Manhood is not, as some believe,
to abolish the Ego. Instead a conscious and
effective Ego has a central role to play in
reaching mature masculinity. An initiated man is
one who has developed the ego consciousness needed
to take moral responsibility for the great forces
in his psyche.
Mature man psychology has perhaps always been a
rare thing on our planet. It is certainly a rare
thing today. It is enormously difficult for us
males to develop to our full masculine potential as
human beings. The struggle with the infantile
within us exerts a tremendous
“gravitational” pull against achieving
that full adult potential.
Nevertheless, we need to fight gravity by dint
of hard labor and to build the
“pyramids,” first of boyhood and then of
manhood, that constitute the core structures of our
masculine selves. Each of us needs to build, brick
by brick, toward the goal of mature masculinity,
until at last we can stand on the high platform at
the top and survey our realm. Central to this
construction project is not only understanding the
building blocks, but developing the mature ego
consciousness that can serve as “project
manager.”
Building Blocks of Mature Masculinity
I see every man as having within him four
powerful archetypal forces: a King, a Warrior,
Magician, and a Lover. These four major forms of
mature masculine energies fit together like the
four sides of a pyramid. They all complement and,
ideally, enrich one another – if we learn to
regulate them properly to be a whole person: a
good King is always also a Warrior, a Magician, and
a Lover. And the same holds true for the other
three.
These four archetypes are mysterious entities or
energy flows. They have been compared to a magnet
beneath a sheet of paper. As iron filings are
sprinkled over the top of the paper, they
immediately arrange themselves into patterns along
the lines of magnetic force. We can see the
patterns of the filing on the paper, but we
can’t see the magnet beneath the
paper—or, better, we can never see the
magnetic force itself, only the visible evidence of
its existence. The same is true of archetypes.
They remain hidden. But we experience their
effects—in art, in poetry, in music, in
religion, in our scientific discoveries, in our
patterns of behavior and of thought and feeling.
All the products of human creativity and human
interaction are like the iron filings. We can see
something of the shapes and patterns of the
archetypes through these manifestations. But we
can never see the “energies” themselves.
They overlap and interpenetrate one another, yt
they can be distinguished from one another for
purposes of clarification. Through our inner work,
they can be brought into conscious dialogue and
“remixed” so that we can realize the
desired balance among their influences in our own
lives.
The Ego as Chair of the Board
Jean Shinoda Bolen has usefully suggested that
we think of this process --untangling and isolating
the archetypes and then remixing them and blending
them -- as a well-run board meeting. The chair
asks each of the officers to speak his or her mind
honestly and openly about the question at hand.
After all opinions have been heard and the matter
has been thoroughly discussed, the chair calls for
a vote, and the decision is made. Often the chair
must cast the deciding vote.
Our Egos are like the chair of the board. And
the board members are the powerful archetypes
within us. Each needs to be heard from. The input
of each archetype--King, Warrior, Magician, Lover--
must be invited and welcomed. But the whole person
under the supervision of the Ego must make the
final decisions in our lives.
How does our Ego consciousness learn to do this?
What used to be done for us by society through
largely unconscious tribal ritual processes, we now
have to take on as our personal moral
responsibility. Our Western civilization pushes us
to become, as Jung said, “individuated”
persons. Any adequate psychology for our time
must be a moral psychology that aids us in taking
personal accountability for the great (often
grandiose) archetypal energies within us and for
consciously building a mature masculine self.
Construction Project Tools
A number of techniques can help us in this
construction project. Analysis of dreams, active
imagination (in which the Ego dialogues with the
energy patterns within, thereby achieving both
differentiation from and access to them),
psychotherapy in a variety of forms, meditation on
the positive aspects of the archetypes, prayer,
ritual process with a spiritual elder, various
forms of spiritual discipline, and other methods
are all important to the difficult process of
training our male Egos toward manhood.
King,
Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the
Archetypes of the Mature Masculine introduces
you to these energies within you as well as to
these techniques for learning to regulate them in a
balanced way.
This is the challenge facing us as men today.
We must step up to the task of becoming the kind of
man we wish we had had in our lives.
© 2007, Robert L.
Moore
* * *
Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but
he has not been able to destroy them. - Octavio
Paz
Dr. Robert
Moore is an internationally recognized Jungian
psychoanalyst and consultant in private practice in
Chicago, Illinois, USA. He is the Distinguished
Service Professor of Psychology, Psychoanalysis and
Spirituality in the Graduate Center of the Chicago
Theological Seminary, where he recently founded and
become director of the new Institute for Advanced
Studies in Spirituality and Wellness. He is a
Training Analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of
Chicago and Director of Research for the Institute
for the Science of Psychoanalysis. Author and
editor of numerous books in psychology and
spirituality, he lectures internationally on his
formulation of a Neo-Jungian paradigm for
psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. He is the author
of, among other books,
The Warrior
Within,
The Magician
Within, The
Lover Within,
The Within
Quartet: King,
Warrior, Magician,
Lover; The
Archetype of Inintiation: Sacred space, ritual
process and personal
transformation;
The
Magician and the Analyst: The archetype of the
magus in occult spirituality and Jungian
analysis; and
Facing
the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual
Grandiosity. Also an
audio with Malidoma Some, John Lee and Robert Bly
called Who
Welcomes the Newborn to this World? African and
Western Perspectives.
His most recent book is The
King Within: A revised and expanded
edition Accessing the King in the Male
Psyche.
www.robertmoore-phd.com
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