Navigating your Masculinity: Part 2 The LOVER
The nature of the Masculine attributes have received much criticism in recent years especially with the feminist movement, but there is much more to the masculine nature of men than this one sided perspective. The following 4 part series are a summary from the work of Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette: KING, WARRIOR, MAGICIAN, LOVER – Rediscovering the Archetype of the Mature Masculine.
Each of the archetypal energy potentials in the male psyche – in both its immature and mature forms – has a triune, or three-part structure. At the top of a triangle we see the archetype in its fullness. At the bottom of the triangle the archetype is experienced in what we call a bipolar dysfunctional, or shadow, form.
The second archetype we look at is THE LOVER:
The Lover archetype is the primal energy pattern of what we could call vividness, aliveness and passion. It lives through the great primal hungers of our species for sex, food, well-being, reproduction, creative adaptation to life’s hardships and ultimately a sense of meaning, without which human beings cannot go on with their lives.
The Lover’s drive is to satisfy those hungers.
The Lover archetype is primary to the psyche also because it is the energy of sensitivity to the outer environment. It expresses what Jungians call the ‘sensation function,’ the function of the psyche that is trained in on all the details of sensory experience, the function that notices colours and forms, sounds, tactile sensations and smells. The Lover monitors the changing texture of the inner psychological world as it responds to incoming sensory impressions.
The Lover is the archetype of play and of ‘display’, of healthy embodiment, of being in the world of sensuous pleasure and in one’s own body without shame. Thus, The Lover is deeply sensual – sensually aware and sensitive to the physical world in all its splendour. His sensitivity leads him to feel compassionately and
united with them. For the man accessing the Lover, all things are bound to each other in mysterious ways. He sees, as we say, “the world in a grain of sand.’’ This is the consciousness that knew long before the invention of holography that we live, in fact, in a ‘holographic’ universe –one in which every part reflects every other in immediate and sympathetic union. It isn’t just that the Lover energy sees the world in a grain of sand. He feels that this is so.
The man under the influence of the Lover wants to touch and be touched. He wants to touch everything physically and emotionally, and he wants to be touched by everything. He recognizes no boundaries. He wants to live out the connectedness he feels with the world inside, in the context of this powerful feelings, and outside, in the context of his relationships with other people. Ultimately, he wants to experience the world of sensual experience in its totality.
He has what is known as an aesthetic consciousness. He experiences everything, no matter what it is, aesthetically. All of life is art to him and evokes subtly nuanced feelings. The nomads of the Kalahari are Lovers. They are aesthetically attuned to everything in their environment. They see hundreds of colours in their desert world, subtle nuances of light and shadow and shades of what to us are simply browns or tans.
The Lover yearns to become One with the Mystery. While feeling the pain and the poignancy of the world, he feels great joy as well. He may also know, for example, the joy of opening a cigar humidor and smelling the exotic aromas of tobaccos. He may also be sensitive to music. He may feel exquisitely the eerie thrumming of the Indian sitar, the swelling of a great symphony, or the ascetic thunk of an Arab clay drum.
Writing may be a sensuous experience for him. Many writers feel that when they smoke, the smoke relaxes them by opening up their senses to impressions, feelings and the nuances of words. The feel deeply connected by doing this with what they call ‘the earth’ or ‘the world’. Inside and outside come together in one continuous whole, and they are able to create.
The man profoundly in touch with the Lover energy experiences his work, and the people on the job with him, through his aesthetic consciousness. He can ‘read’ people like a book. He is often excruciatingly sensitive to their shifts in mood and can feel their hidden motives. This can be very painful experience indeed.
The man under the influence of the Lover does not want to stop at socially created boundaries. He stands against the artificially of such things. His life is often unconventional and “messy” – the artist’s studio, the creative scholar’s study, the ‘go for it’ boss’s desk. Consequently, because he is opposed to “law”, in this broad sense, we see enacted in his life of confrontation with the conventional the old tension between sensuality and morality, between love and duty, between, as Joseph Campbell poetically describes it, “amor and Roma” – “amor” standing for passionate experience and “Roma” standing for duty and responsibility to law and order.
These men often seem to move in a world behind or beneath the world of daylight commons sense. From this hidden world they receive, often in the form of almost audible words, gusts of strong feelings, unaccounted-for smells, sensations of heat and cold not accessible to others, images of horror and beauty, and clues about what is really going on with people. They may even receive impressions about the future. The businessman who has “hunches” is also accessing the Lover. So are men who have premonitions and intuitions about people, situations, or of their future. In those moments, the underlying unity of things is revealed to them, even in mundane ways, and they are drawn into the Lover energy, which connects us with realities of which we are not normally aware.
Any artistic or creative endeavor and almost every profession, from farming to stockbroking, from house painting to computer software designing, is drawing upon the energies of the Lover for creativity.
So are connoisseurs, those men who really appreciate fine foods, wines, tobaccos, primitive artifacts and a host of other material objects.
The minister whose sermons are animated by images and stories, who is, as Native Americans said, “thinking with his heart” instead of only with his head, is accessing the Lover. The Lover is singing through his sermons. All of us, when we stop doing and just let ourselves be and feel without the pressure to perform, when we “stop to smell the roses”, are feeling the Lover. (The movie: A River Runs Through It, comes to mind)
The Shadow Lover: the Addicted and the Impotent Lover
A man living in either pole of the Lover’s Shadow, like a man living in any of the shadow forms of the masculine energies, is possessed by the very energy that could be a source of life and well-being for him, of accessed appropriately. As long as he is possessed by the Shadow Lover, however, the energy works to his destruction and to the destruction of others around him.
The most forceful and urgent question a man identified with the addicted Lover asks is: “Why should I put any limits on my sensual and sexual experience of this vast world, a world that holds unending pleasures for me?”
How does the Addict possess a man? The primary and most deeply disturbing characteristics of the Shadow Lover as Addict is his lostness, which shows up in a number of ways. A man possessed by the Shadow Lover becomes literally lost in an ocean of the senses, not just “in sunsets” or “in reveries.” The slightest impressions from the outer world are enough to pull him off center. He gets drawn into loneliness of a train whistle in the night, into the emotional devastation of a fight at the the office, into the blandishments of the women he encounters on the street. Pulled first one way and then another, he is not the master of his own fate. He becomes the victim of his own sensitivity.
This lostness shows up too, in the way that the Addict lives for the pleasure of the moment only and locks men into a web of immobility from which they cannot escape. This is what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr talked about as “the sin of sensuality.” And it’s what the Hindus talk about as maya – the dance of illusion, the intoxicating (addictive) dance of sensuous things that enchants and enthrals the mind, catching us up in the cycles of pleasures and pain.
What happens when we are caught in the fires of love, roasting the agony and the ecstasy of our own longing, is that we are unable to disincarnate, to step back, to act. We are unable to, as we say, “come to ourselves.” Many are the lives that are ruined because people cannot extricate themselves from destructive marriages and relationships. Whenever we feel ourselves caught in an addictive relationship, we had better beware, because the chances are very good that we have become victims of the Shadow Lover.
In his lostness –within and without- the victim of the active pole of the Shadow Lover is eternally restless. This is a man who is always searching for something. He doesn’t know what it is he’s looking for, but he’s the cowboy at the end of the movie riding off alone into the sunset seeking some other excitement, some other adventure, unable to settle down. He has an insatiable hunger to experience some vague something that is just over the next hill.
Here’s where we see the Don Juan syndrome, the man moving from one woman to another, compulsively searching for he knows not what, is a man whose inner structures have not yet solidified. Because he himself is fragmented within, and not centered, he is pushed and pulled around by the illusory wholeness he thinks is out there in the world of feminine forms and sensual experiences.
A man possessed by the Addict Lover is really a man possessed by the unconscious –his own personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The unconscious can be seen as the chaotic “deep” of the primeval ocean or the feminine Earth Mother energies of the underworld. When the Addict are threatened by the overwhelming force of his unresolved Mother issues, he cannot develop his masculine Ego structures outside of the “feminine” unconscious. He needs to go back to the Hero stage of masculine development and slay the dragon of his over connectedness with his mortal mother and with the Mother –the “God, All-Mother, Mighty.”
This is exactly what the Addict prevents us from doing. It stands opposed to boundaries. But boundaries, constructed with heroic effort, are what a man possessed by the Addict needs most. He doesn’t need more oneness with all things. He’s already got too much of that. What he needs is distance and detachment.
We can see, then, how the Shadow Lover as Addict is a carryover from childhood into adulthood of the absorption into the Mother of the mama’s boy. The man under the power of the Addict is still within the Mother, and he’s struggling to get out.
If the Mama’s Boy’s desire is to touch what is forbitten to touch –that is, the Mother – and to cross boundaries that he regards as being artificial –ultimately, the incest taboo –the Addict, arising as he does out of the Mama’s Boy, must learn about the usefulness of boundaries the hard way. He must learn that his lack of masculine structure, his lack of discipline, his resulting affairs, and his authority problems will inevitably get him into trouble.
What happens if men feel that they are out of touch with the Lover in his fullness? They are then possessed by the Impotent Lover. They will experience their lives in an unfeeling way. They will “feel” the sterility and flatness. Or they feel what psychologists call “flattened affect” – lack of enthusiasm, lack of vividness, lack of aliveness. They will feel bored and listless. They might have trouble getting up in the morning and trouble going to sleep at night. Or they may find themselves increasingly alienated from their families, co-workers and friends. Everything may begin to feel like the passage in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes that declares, “All is vanity, and a striving after wind” and “there is nothing new under the sun.”
If men are appropriately accessing the Lover, but keeping their Ego structures strong, they feel related, connected, alive, enthusiastic, compassionate, emphatic, energized and romantic about their lives, their goals and their work. It it’s the Lover, properly accessed, that gives men a sense of meaning –what we have been calling spirituality. It is the Lover who is the source of their longings for a better world for themselves and others. He it is who is the idealist, and the dreamer. He is the one who wants us to have an abundance of good things.
The Lover keeps the other masculine energies humane, loving, and related to each other and to the real life situation of human beings struggling in a difficult world. The other 3 archetypes of the King, The Warrior and the Magician need the Lover to energize them, to humanize them and to give them their ultimate purpose –love. They need the Lover to keep them from becoming sadistic.
The Lover needs them as well. The Lover without boundaries, in his chaos of feeling and sensuality, needs the King to define limits for him, to give him structure, to order his chaos so that it can be channeled creatively.
Without limits, the Lover energy turns negative and destructive. The Lover needs the Warrior in order to be able to act decisively, in order to detach, with a clean cut of the sword, from the web of immobilizing sensuality. And the Lover needs the Magician to help him back off from the ensnaring effect of his emotions, in order to reflect, to get a more objective perspective on things, to disconnect –enough at least to see the big picture and to experience the reality beneath the seeming.
Tragically, the unrelenting attacks on men’s vitality and ‘shinning’ begin early in their lives. Many men have so repressed the Lover that it has become very hard for them to feel passionate about anything in their lives. The trouble with most men is not that they feel too much passion, but that they don’t feel their passion much at all. They don’t feel their joy. They don’t feel able to be alive and to live their lives the way they wanted to live them when they began. They may even feel that feelings are annoying encumbrances and inappropriate for a man. It is now the time for men to find the spontaneity and joy of life inside themselves, so will their lives become more abundantly and so also enable others to live abundantly.
