“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
— Carl Gustav Jung (Modern Man in Search of a Soul)
We are witnessing a quiet crisis in the United States…and not one that comes with all the bells, whistles, or media fanfare. No marches are held for it, no signs drawn up, nor flags waved. It does not necessarily draw headlines, for it is the kind of crisis that festers in boardrooms, in bedrooms, behind the wheel of a car, and beneath the ribcage. It is adult men who are suffering and mostly silently. Mostly alone.
While awareness of mental health has grown, men remain one of the most underserved and misunderstood populations in the field. This is not due to a lack of pain – rather far from it, actually. It is due to a lack of space, and more critically, a lack of nuanced understanding.
A System Not Built for Them
Men die by suicide at disproportionate rates. They are more likely to externalize distress through substance use, violence, or even total emotional withdrawal. Their mind does what it knows best: protect the heart by building a palace of thought. But they remain emotionally silent. Stunted. Of all demographics, men are the least likely to seek help. The reasons of such are complex – cultural, social, psychological – but one thing is all too clear: the mental health field, for all its progress, has done too little to speak to men in a way they can hear and respect.
The prevailing scripts tells men to ‘be vulnerable,’ yet simultaneously pathologizes their silence, aggression, or stoicism, without curiosity to ask what might lie beyond the surface.
Most clinicians are ill-equipped to reach men on a soul level. The problem is not just one of technique, it is an absence of projection withdrawal, and of mythic literacy: the understanding that every man is living a story deeper than he can name. Few men have been initiated by elder men into their psyche, their wounds, or their inner world. They have instead inherited a hollow script: manhood shaped by worry, war, and work, as Jungian psychologist, James Hollis, so poignantly described.
Thus, men are emotionally stunted not by nature, and not entirely by choice, but by inheritance.
“Our society has long treated men as machines, as bodies expendable in the name of progress or profit. Men have overruled their pain and soul’s delight, taught to think of themselves as “mechanisms”.”
—James Hollis (Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men)
The Wound Beneath the Armor
As a clinician specializing in working primarily with male clients, I have sat across from men whose bodies are taut with rage, whose minds race with shame, and whose eyes are starved to be seen. I have witnessed what James Hollis also described so incisively: men dominated by unconscious complexes, ungrieved betrayals, and a loss of inner authority.
Men are not suffering because they are physically weak – quite obviously the opposite in many cases. They are suffering because they were never taught how to be strong in a way that includes the soul. A strength that makes space for vulnerability, for attunement to the inner world, and for the courage it takes to feel.
Instead, men have become possessed by the survival-driven aspects of the masculine psyche: logic, control, pride, and dominance – while the balancing presence of the inner feminine has been severed. Receptivity, emotional attunement, softness, and intuition have been amputated (often in childhood) in an unconscious attempt to survive in a world that shamed their presence.
In the present age, these qualities are still mocked and pathologized. Men are told they embody “toxic masculinity,” a phrase that wholly fails to offer compassion or even a glimmer of curiosity. Masculinity, in any form should not be worded as “toxic”. It should, in many cases, be understood as wounded (often profoundly so) and those wounds are almost always shaped by early experience and the internal narratives those experiences gave rise to.
“Men today cannot claim their identity via culture because they are obliged to find other uninitiated males as their models or succumb to the empty values of a materialistic society.”
—James Hollis (Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men)
The Mythic Terrain of the Male Psyche
The work of Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman, moreover, offer rich insight in the realm of the biological male psyche. Hillman, in his work, The Puer Papers, explores the archetype of the puer aeternus: the eternal boy. This pattern reveals itself in men who remain suspended in fantasy, unable or unwilling to root themselves in the demands of responsibility, commitment, and time.
However, what is often missed in comprehending this archetype is thus: the puer is not a problem to be solved, cured, or disciplined. He is rather a psychic figure, a deeply human experience, longing to be witnessed. The puer aeternus is not some immature impulse, he is a mythic call for meaning, imagination, and for divine connection… he is the flame of the soul and the whisper of the Self. When pathologized, he becomes a shame-ridden burden, but when honored, he becomes a masterful guide: fierce, restless, poetic, and raw.
“If the soul is to be healed, the myth must be remembered.”
—James Hillman (The Puer Papers)
Too often in our field, we treat symptoms without touching the myth…the symbolic core from which symptoms arise. We medicate in order to retrain, because physical restraint is now seen as unethical. Attempt to motivate through rehearsed unconditional positive regard, though behind the mask, many clinicians are unconsciously activated, subtly (or perhaps overtly) disdainful, and lost in countertransference. And moreover, mandate behavioral change without ever asking:
- What story are you living?
- What inner gods are you serving?
- What unlived grief is demanding expression through your actions?
- And, perhaps the most vital of all: Who are you behind your masks of bullshit – who were you conditioned out of being?
The Cost of Emotional Starvation
One recurring theme I have observed in therapy with my male clients is this: a disconnection between the mind and the body. Many cannot name what they feel. Some cannot even admit that they feel anything at all. For some, emotional illiteracy was simply the absence of teaching. For others, it was far more brutal: they were actively shamed out of knowing. Anger, anxiety, guilt, and irritation became the only acceptable expressions. Beneath those, however, lies something far more primal: terror. Grief. And an aching, near-unbearable hunger to be understood.
The absence of comradery. The evaporation of deep male friendships that are not ruled by the unconscious ego. The relentless performance of manhood. All of it contributes to a quiet but excruciating sense of isolation – rarely spoken of, but constantly lived. Competition has replaced brotherhood. Pride has replaced presence. Many are breaking under the weight of it all, and they are doing so in silence.
“Perhaps the greatest tragedy for men is that fear estranges them from their own anima—their source of feeling, connection, and vitality. This inner disconnection obliges an outer one as well: estranged from themselves, they become estranged from other men. What remains is often only surface-level conversation—sports, politics, events—while the deeper current of relatedness goes unspoken, unfelt.”
— James Hollis (Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men)
Not Redefinition – Reclamation
This is not a call to redefine masculinity according to some sanitized script. It is a call to reclaim its fullness, its complexity, its inherent contradiction – and to invite men into deeper contact with the soul of their being. The goal is not to “soften” men or domesticate them into passivity. It is to honor them. To be a witness to them. And through that witnessing, help them encounter the totality of who they are, including the myth, the rage, the erotic, and the divine.
“The opposite of repression is not expression. The opposite of repression is responsibility.”
—James Hollis
True strength is not domination; it is integration. Maturity is not emotional sterility; it is responsibility. And healing does not happen in isolation, but rather in initiation: in fellowship, in the presence of another who sees you not as a pathology to be corrected, but as a human soul navigating a forgotten myth.
Men were given a broken compass for navigating their inner world. That brokenness is not their fault, but it is their inheritance. And healing begins the moment we dare to tell them that.
Final Reflections
This blog post is far from the end of the story, it is the beginning of a re-storying.
We must meet men where they are: not with judgment, but with depth. Not with platitudes, but with presence. Not with quick fixes, but with the long, winding descent into the depths of hell…or in other words, their personal unconscious; that is where the real work happens. It will take time, patience, and perseverance. But, it is the most vital work we can do.
Let us, as clinicians, give men a place to go with their pain. Let us give them stories that honor their longing and their rage, their erotic charge, and their sacred wounds. Give them unpolluted eyes and attuned ears, where their authentic selves and unlived desires may finally come to be seen, heard, and held.
Let us become witnesses and guides, instead of saviors. Moreover, let us not be golems of our education: mechanical, reactive, hollow. I ask that we learn to walk beside men as they step into the wilderness of their own becoming and comprehend that as within, so without.
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”
―Carl Gustav Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
