Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Jungian psychotherapist Michael Boyle wants to reconnect men with each other to nd their creative manhood Interview by John Daniel Photographs by Jacky Chapman
A circle of men is a great leveller and a profound learning arena. Each man is my father, teacher, son, brother and mirror
awakening and the harnessing of the ego in the service of the souls purpose. Although I appreciate one-to-one work, and have benefited from it myself. I see a clear developmental sequence to group work and on to full expression in the community. Its akin to the developmental line from dependence to independence and then on to interdependence you cant jump from stage one to stage three. Men seem to discover much about themselves by interacting with other men in groups and unlearning harmful and destructive habits. A circle of men is a great leveller and a profound learning arena for old and young, rich and poor. Each man is my father, teacher, son, brother and mirror. Theres a fundamental loss of community across contemporary mass society, and the nuclear family isnt working either. Apprenticeships, shipyards, the mining industry, farming and other such spheres where men and boys used to connect are diminished and almost gone. Our society is most broken and dangerous between generations of males. So hard-earned wisdom doesnt get passed on and there are few male role models on offer, apart from images of financial success, which are super-cool and macho. I founded the charity Abandofbrothers to redress this. Young men seem to learn mostly by imitation and through direct experience rather than listening to what they are being told. So we take youngsters away on an intensive residential rite-of-passage experience called The Quest. We use the myth of Parzival as a means of engagement and we match each youngster with a local man as a mentor. This year were working with lads on probation from
prison, 80 per cent of whom, the figures tell us, will return to prison pretty soon. We hope to offer them choices they were never aware of before. Some may not be ready to leave familiar comforts, or mother, or the institution the first challenge for Parzival so we assess them for readiness first. Male mentors have to be confident in meeting and acknowledging young men wherever they are emotionally depression and raging anger can be a sane response to these young mens predicament. Weve seed-bedded Abandofbrothers in Brighton, where weve got 80 men on a waiting list to train as volunteer mentors. We hope to expand to other cities. I like to imagine myself as a bit of a subversive. Much therapy seems to me to be about getting people to adapt and fit into the social order, but I believe that human beings need more than just socialisation and behaviour adaptation. They need deep transformative experiences. I support men in becoming whoever they are as individuals, despite the pressures of a society that has no interest in maturity and where the values of the market place and the mass media drain imagination and depth. It requires a dedicated effort for groups like MKP and Abandofbrothers to provide the necessary conditions the liminal space that can foster a more powerfully creative manhood than our consumer culture would want us to provide. But the growing willingness and ability of men to tell their stories, express their grief and rage and admit their fears is cause for optimism and a great source of hope for us all. www.abandofbrothers.org.uk