The German psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich writes about this father-son crisis in his book called Society Without the Father. The gist of his idea is that if the son does not actually see what his father does during the day and through all the seasons of the year, a hole will appear in the son’s psyche, and the hole will fill with demons who tell him that his father’s work is evil and that the father is evil.
As a citizen he will take part in therapy rather than politics.
I found myself missing contact with men—or should I say my father? I began to think of him not as someone who had deprived me of love or attention or companionship, but as someone who himself had been deprived, by his father and his mother and by the culture. This rethinking is still going on.
The Celtic tradition offers as a male image Cuchulain—when he gets hot, his shin muscles switch around to the front and smoke comes out of the top of his head.
It is good that the divine is associated with the Virgin Mary and a blissful Jesus, but we can sense how different it would be for young men if we lived in a culture where the divine also was associated with mad dancers, fierce fanged men, and a being entirely underwater, covered with hair.
When a man gets in touch with the Wild Man, a true strength may be added. He’s able to shout and say what he wants in a way that the Sixties-Seventies man is not able to.
Something in the adolescent male wants risk, courts danger, goes out to the edge—even to the edge of death. In our story then, the boy’s finger hints of wounds each of us have already received in our attempts to let the “Wild Man” out of the cage. Old men don’t give us the wound. We do it ourselves. Whether the old men of the past scar us with a seashell, or tattoo us painfully, or we do it ourselves, the scar stands for a wound that is already there, some missing tooth that we have each felt with our tongues. The wounded finger in our story stands for a wound most young men in our culture have already received.
Our story gives a teaching diametrically opposite. It says that where a man’s wound is, that is where his genius will be.