The Case of the Missing Male Authority
35
The Case of the Missing Male Authority
HERBERT
J. FREUDENBERGER
In the widespread confusion of our times and with much of the emphasis on the increased "disrelatedness"* within our families, t w o major factors are being overlooked as various attempts are being made to understand what is going wrong. These factors are the importance of the presence within the home of a "legitimate" authority figure and the need to reassess the values b y which we live today. I believe that it is only through an honest, direct confrontation with what we as parents are doing and are failing to do that we shall be able to deal effectively with what we see happening to a large segment of our society. W h a t do we mean b y a "legitimate" authority? W e mean a person who, b y HERBERT J. FREUDENBERGER,PH.D., in private practice as a psychoanalyst in New York in both individual and group therapy, is Adjunct Assistant Professor at New York University and Co-ordinator of its Social Science Lecture Series, and a Senior Member and Training Analyst at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. He is also a consultant for industry, a past president of the New York Society of Clinical Psychologists, and author of many articles published in professional journals. * I use the term disrelated rather than unrelated or nonrelated to describe what is a very specific and destructive phenomenon that operates in many American families today, a phenomenon of which the primary cause is the lack of communication and the faulty communication between adults and youths. I have dealt with this more extensively in a paper, "Treatment and Dynamics of the 'Disrelated' Teenager and His Parents in the American Society," presented at the American Psychological Association's symposium on "The Disrelated Youth and His Family in the American Society" in September, 1968. The paper will be published in Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, January, 1970.
36
Journal of Religion and Health
virtue of the competence vested in him by a group, is considered to possess the right to command and to enforce obedience, to act in an official capacity, to be respected. This competence is usually validated by the group's recognition of the superiority of that person's education, family position, experience, training, or reputation. In the home setting, such an authority figure can be the father; elsewhere, he can be a teacher in school, a policeman on the street, an adult in the neighborhood, a minister or rabbi in the spiritual realm, or a psychoanalyst in the area of mental health. The important function that a legitimate authority serves as a standardsetter and a source of a sense of reality in his primary and basic habitat--the family group--has been overlooked. In past times, the home was generally the father's place of work the farm, the little shop at the back of the house, the stable, the hostelry. Even in the cities, which were then much smaller, the father's place of work was not very far from the home--the schoolhouse, the blacksmith's shop, the mine, the big farm only a mile or so away. Often the son worked side by side with his father, even from a very early age; or he watched older brothers help the father. He wanted to help, too, to be a "big" boy--but in a helpful way, not "big" by showing how daring he was behind the wheel of a car or by taking harmful drugs. Later, he might try to be "big" with girls, but this was at least along the right track. Nowadays the father has to be absent for much longer hours. The boy never sees his father at work. Often all he sees of a man "at work" is someone puttering around the house, fixing this or that, chores that the father may as often as not be anxious to put off. Or the boy sees a TV-watching, apparently passive, "do,nothing" father, who may brag about how much he gets away with at the office, shop, or factory. When the middle-class father does, on rare occasions, take his son to his place of work on a school holiday, the boy usually does not comprehend what work his father is really engaged in. In the lower class, the laborer certainly does not take his son to his place of work. This boy also receives only a minimum awareness of what his father in reality does. In the past, there were additional male figures of authority and identity whom children could use, such as grandfathers, uncles, older cousins, all co-operating
The Case o{ the Missi,zg Male Authority
37
perhaps to do a job of work for the good of the whole family--building a barn together, painting the house, tilling the soil, tinkering with the buggy. These and other experiences that lend a sense of reality are often missing in the lives of our children. Today, because of the father's economic need to be employed outside the home, he leaves his family in the morning and returns at night. He is absent during the very hours when his youngsters (and his wife, too) may need him most. Our society, unfortunately, more and more frequently measures a man by his position in business, his economic success, and his sexual prowess rather than by his success as a good human being and father. In much the same way, the university professor is measured not so much by his skill as a teacher as by how many publications he has to his credit; the artist not so much by the greatness of his paintings as by the price he charges for them; the politician not so much by his convictions and leadership as by his skill in avoiding answering questions; the psychoanalyst not so much by his competence and training or by the kind of humanity he evidences as by the fees he can demand. Certainly a confusion of values, if not a total lack of them, is indicated by these measurements of the significant representatives of rational authority in our midst. What are the consequences of the absence of the father as a legitimate authority in the home? A very important outcome is that it is the mother who becomes increasingly dominant as the value-giver and disciplinarian. The resuits of this situation have implications that are different for the daughter from those for the son, although they are equally crucial in the lives of both. For the daughter, a distorted image of the role of a mother within a family may develop. The girl may see the woman because of the authority functions the mother must take over--much less as a feminine person than as an authoritarian figure. The daughter may react to this presented view of a woman's role in two ways. She may either emulate it in her future relationships with men, or she may negate what she has observed by attempting to be the opposite of her mother, and thereby become a non-value-giver in her home when she in turn is a mother.
38
Journal of Religion and Health
Another consequence for the girl is that she will become confused about her choice of a mate. She will not know whether she should try to find a man who, in her eyes, is similar to the nondominant father she experienced, or whether she should seek a dominant man, and in the process end up with a brutalizing male. Obviously, the role that a father and mother play while the girl is growing up will have far-reaching consequences for her. W e can conjecture that the absence of so many fathers in their young daughters' lives may allow these girls, once they are married, to feel generally quite comfortable about having their husbands more out of the home than in it. This results in even larger numbers of absent fathers, and the cycle continues. In addition, is it not possible that a lack of facility in communicating with males, which is something so many young women patients complain of in our offices, is a direct consequence of an earlier lack of day-to-day experiences with their fathers? For the son, the absent father often leaves some serious gaps in his awareness of what, as an authority, a father actually is and does. If the son sees the father ttt all, he often sees a tired father who comes to him briefly iust before bedtime, a father who may be minimally interested in the daily occurrences in his home. The young boy wonders what his father does away from home all day long, and, if there is also a serious lack of communication within the family, he begins to feel in time that his father is less important to him and to the functioning of the family than is his mother. Such a father seems literally unreal to the boy, a specter that comes and goes when the boy is asleep. This "absence" of the father does not permit the son to experience a very important element in his development--the opportunity to "bounce off" a male in give-and-take, of having limits set, discipline exercized, and thoughts and experiences shared. The father who is "absent" has difficulty in conveying a sense of reality to this family. The father who is "present" spells Reality for his son and the family, with a capital "R." There is no difference in the consequences to the b o y of the physically absent authority figure and the emotionally absent--although physically present--authority figure. The son who has not enjoyed a give-and-take relationship with his father cannot be expected to know what to do in turn as an authority with his own son. He will himself most likely be-
The Case of the Missing Male Authority
39
come the absent father and, as such, neglect in turn to provide his children with a sense of reality. What do we mean by a sense of reality? W e mean the awareness on the part of the child that fathers are people who are interested in the problems and day-to-day experiences of the family, who cope with financial decisions that affect the family, who enforce discipline, give and accept opinions, state convictions about life, religion, education, prejudices, politics, and take a stand on things that are important to the family as a whole and to an individual child in particular. By having his father "there" to impart all this, the son can view him as a conveyor of personal and social values and as an individual who has a stake in the realities of the world around him. Historically, it has been the man and not the woman who has gone out and confronted the real world. It has, therefore, been the father who has archetypically been able to acquire some of the important wherewithal to evaluate more concretely than the woman the world outside the family unit. I do not mean to imply by this that the woman does not have a sense of reality; she is certainly called upon to make reality decisions within the home; but, being so much in the home, she is often less cognizant of the problems in the world outside than is the man. There have been an adequate number of studies and evaluations o f the differences between the male and the female roles; and, while I do not feel it to be within the scope of this paper to present these materials at this point, I wish to state that I firmly believe that psychologically the woman's role has not been to convey reality to her children. Rather she is the one who, in the family group, often operating more on intuition, has been the conveyor of feelings and affection, and who, by virtue of her biologic child-bearing functions, has been generally less personally involved with the realities of the outside world than has the man. However, in view of the father's absence in recent times, the woman has been forced to operate as a disciplinarian and to be principally responsible for the rearing of the children. Although this position may be gratifying to some women, others have been unwilling to fill it. A number of subtle manifestations of this unwillingness have appeared. What are some of them? The woman who is forced into the unwanted role of authority figure
40
Journal of Religion and Health
may become subtly hostile to her children. She may carp at them a great deal, find fault with them, and become chronically argumentative. She may become overprotective. She may become overly permissive, because she really does not know how to be, or wish to be, the one to have exclusively to set reality and disciplinary limits. ~There are, of course, exceptions.) In time, the corrosive influences of permissiveness, overprotection, and hostility creep into the very fabric of the family. The child becomes aware of them, and the parents become increasingly helpless and powerless to assert themselves--especially now that, since the child senses his parents' plight, he may have become less manageable than he normally would be. Out of indecision, the parents do little or nothing. Some parents literally fear their children and refrain from asserting their authority for fear of doing their children emotional harm. What these parents do not realize is that this very "do-nothing" policy, this lack of stated and acted-on values--values to which they are obviously irrevocably committed--this fear to confront their children, this lack of communication are the very factors from which originate the seeds of destruction that will eventually grow in their children. As I have indicated in my paper on the disrelated youth,* the continued lack of communication between teen-agers and their parents eventually leads to mutual disregard and distrust. On the part of the child, this distrust easily translates itself into contempt, and this contempt extends to others outside the family--to the teacher in school, to the policeman and fireman on the street, to the faculty member on the university campus. Is it not possible that further evidence of the consequences of the missing male authority in the home is to be found not only in our disparagement and contempt for all authority, but also in the seeking on the part of some people for a dictator type of political authority, which thus compensates for the lack of authority they are experiencing in all other areas of their lives? Sadly, in these choices, they are confusing benevolence and firmness with tyranny and legitimate with illegitimate authority. If ministers, teachers, and psychoanalysts consider themselves to be legiti* Op. tit.
The Case of the Missing Male Authority
41
mate and rational authorities, then each must view himself as a carrier of values and as a responsible individual capable of setting limits and taking stands. This means that often the religious leader with his parishioners, the university professor with his students, and the psychoanalyst with his patients must come forward at times and speak out on his personal beliefs and conduct as a legitimate authority. The following incident, which took place within one of my therapy groups, may help to clarify what I mean. This particular group is composed of nine men and women who have known each other for approximately one year. The members come from a variety of walks of life, religious backgrounds, and parts of the country. Their marital status is also varied. The group is, in other words, a typical cosmopolitan gathering. One day, one of the members, a former rabbi, was arrested during a university campus rebellion. After his release on bail that same day, he was able to attend the therapy session. He showed up very upset and angry at the authorities. In the course of the session, he began to berate members of the group for their cowardice in not participating in the demonstration. Cross arguments and accusations followed, and the session began to take on some very angry overtones, bordering on violent assault, which, nevertheless, was not acted out because the group was aware that such behavior was not acceptable within a therapeutic situation. At a particular point, I interrupted the group to remind the patient that, as I had told him on a number of other occasions, his continued seeking out of, and placing himself in, potentially violent situations could eventually lead to serious personal injury to himself. He had been fired from a number of jobs, was unable to function as a rabbi, had been asked to leave a university because of academic failures, and had once before been arrested during a peace demonstration. I did not, however, during the session I am describing, enter into the rightness or wrongness of his social beliefs; rather I pointed out to him his failure to take responsibility for his continued acting-out and his unwillingness to recognize the terrible problem he had with authority of any kind; I told him
42
Journal o( Religion and Health
that the current arrest was just one more manifestation of his hostility in his long line of antiauthority outbursts. This stand on my part prompted an uproar within the group. I was accused of being a dictator, of not permitting the patient freedom of expression, of feeling threatened by his strength of conviction, and of being, among other things, "an archeonservative representative of the middle class." The men in the group, with the exception of the patient, were on the 9 quiet, coming wholly neither to his defense nor mine. They took equivocating, rational positions and attempted to discuss the pros and cons of the various extreme views that had been verbalized. For my part, I very loudly and angrily held to my point of view that the patient's outburst, his insistence on the rightness of his behavior and position were not only an irrational denial of what he repetitively acted upon, but were also potentially suicidal in nature. All in all, I can say, it was quite a session. What did I, as well as the group, learn in retrospect from this incident? For one thing, the outbreak was seen as a replica of what the patient experienced in his home. His mother and older sisters (coincidentally, four out of the five women in the group were on his side during the confrontation) had pampered and supported him, while his father, symbolically represented by the men in the group, had hidden behind his evening newspaper. There was a major difference, however, between the group situation and the original home skuation--me, the therapist. I, unlike his father, took a definke and firm stand. I let him know that if he continued in his behavior he would one day get himself into serious difficulties. I firmly believe that by doing this I was not only being the psychoanalyst, but I was taking the position in the group of a legkimate, concerned, and involved male authority. Gradually, the rationality of my stand and my concern for his welfare became apparent to him. Certainly, many transference and countertransference dynamics, which are not within the scope of this paper, were present. After 9some time, a number of important aspects of his life became clearer to him. He began to see how much of his behavior was caused by his resentment against the father who was more or less physically present but emotionally absent
The Case of the Missing Male Authority
43
even when he was at home. (The father was a service station owner and worked long hours seven days a week.) The patient came to understand that during the group session on the day of his arrest, we had become to him personifications of the absent father, the overprotective mother, and the nonparticipants of his family. In time, he also recognized that almost invariably in his childhood it had been the women of his household who had taken over concern with family matters and discipline, because the father was "too busy at the service station." Parenthetically, I wonder how often juvenile delinquency, street gangs, dropouts, and the hippie phenomenon can be explained in part as a young man's venting his anger on society because the reality-and-value-giving man had not been available to him in his childhood. I, for one, have found time and again that the young person eventually responds to structure, concern, understanding, awareness, even discipline, when these are given in a rational manner. Certainly, these are not to be found in the home lacking a legitimate authority. And certainly, the most healthy growing up of both boys and girls requires that this authority be a male.
35
The Case of the Missing Male Authority
HERBERT
J. FREUDENBERGER
In the widespread confusion of our times and with much of the emphasis on the increased "disrelatedness"* within our families, t w o major factors are being overlooked as various attempts are being made to understand what is going wrong. These factors are the importance of the presence within the home of a "legitimate" authority figure and the need to reassess the values b y which we live today. I believe that it is only through an honest, direct confrontation with what we as parents are doing and are failing to do that we shall be able to deal effectively with what we see happening to a large segment of our society. W h a t do we mean b y a "legitimate" authority? W e mean a person who, b y HERBERT J. FREUDENBERGER,PH.D., in private practice as a psychoanalyst in New York in both individual and group therapy, is Adjunct Assistant Professor at New York University and Co-ordinator of its Social Science Lecture Series, and a Senior Member and Training Analyst at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. He is also a consultant for industry, a past president of the New York Society of Clinical Psychologists, and author of many articles published in professional journals. * I use the term disrelated rather than unrelated or nonrelated to describe what is a very specific and destructive phenomenon that operates in many American families today, a phenomenon of which the primary cause is the lack of communication and the faulty communication between adults and youths. I have dealt with this more extensively in a paper, "Treatment and Dynamics of the 'Disrelated' Teenager and His Parents in the American Society," presented at the American Psychological Association's symposium on "The Disrelated Youth and His Family in the American Society" in September, 1968. The paper will be published in Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, January, 1970.
36
Journal of Religion and Health
virtue of the competence vested in him by a group, is considered to possess the right to command and to enforce obedience, to act in an official capacity, to be respected. This competence is usually validated by the group's recognition of the superiority of that person's education, family position, experience, training, or reputation. In the home setting, such an authority figure can be the father; elsewhere, he can be a teacher in school, a policeman on the street, an adult in the neighborhood, a minister or rabbi in the spiritual realm, or a psychoanalyst in the area of mental health. The important function that a legitimate authority serves as a standardsetter and a source of a sense of reality in his primary and basic habitat--the family group--has been overlooked. In past times, the home was generally the father's place of work the farm, the little shop at the back of the house, the stable, the hostelry. Even in the cities, which were then much smaller, the father's place of work was not very far from the home--the schoolhouse, the blacksmith's shop, the mine, the big farm only a mile or so away. Often the son worked side by side with his father, even from a very early age; or he watched older brothers help the father. He wanted to help, too, to be a "big" boy--but in a helpful way, not "big" by showing how daring he was behind the wheel of a car or by taking harmful drugs. Later, he might try to be "big" with girls, but this was at least along the right track. Nowadays the father has to be absent for much longer hours. The boy never sees his father at work. Often all he sees of a man "at work" is someone puttering around the house, fixing this or that, chores that the father may as often as not be anxious to put off. Or the boy sees a TV-watching, apparently passive, "do,nothing" father, who may brag about how much he gets away with at the office, shop, or factory. When the middle-class father does, on rare occasions, take his son to his place of work on a school holiday, the boy usually does not comprehend what work his father is really engaged in. In the lower class, the laborer certainly does not take his son to his place of work. This boy also receives only a minimum awareness of what his father in reality does. In the past, there were additional male figures of authority and identity whom children could use, such as grandfathers, uncles, older cousins, all co-operating
The Case o{ the Missi,zg Male Authority
37
perhaps to do a job of work for the good of the whole family--building a barn together, painting the house, tilling the soil, tinkering with the buggy. These and other experiences that lend a sense of reality are often missing in the lives of our children. Today, because of the father's economic need to be employed outside the home, he leaves his family in the morning and returns at night. He is absent during the very hours when his youngsters (and his wife, too) may need him most. Our society, unfortunately, more and more frequently measures a man by his position in business, his economic success, and his sexual prowess rather than by his success as a good human being and father. In much the same way, the university professor is measured not so much by his skill as a teacher as by how many publications he has to his credit; the artist not so much by the greatness of his paintings as by the price he charges for them; the politician not so much by his convictions and leadership as by his skill in avoiding answering questions; the psychoanalyst not so much by his competence and training or by the kind of humanity he evidences as by the fees he can demand. Certainly a confusion of values, if not a total lack of them, is indicated by these measurements of the significant representatives of rational authority in our midst. What are the consequences of the absence of the father as a legitimate authority in the home? A very important outcome is that it is the mother who becomes increasingly dominant as the value-giver and disciplinarian. The resuits of this situation have implications that are different for the daughter from those for the son, although they are equally crucial in the lives of both. For the daughter, a distorted image of the role of a mother within a family may develop. The girl may see the woman because of the authority functions the mother must take over--much less as a feminine person than as an authoritarian figure. The daughter may react to this presented view of a woman's role in two ways. She may either emulate it in her future relationships with men, or she may negate what she has observed by attempting to be the opposite of her mother, and thereby become a non-value-giver in her home when she in turn is a mother.
38
Journal of Religion and Health
Another consequence for the girl is that she will become confused about her choice of a mate. She will not know whether she should try to find a man who, in her eyes, is similar to the nondominant father she experienced, or whether she should seek a dominant man, and in the process end up with a brutalizing male. Obviously, the role that a father and mother play while the girl is growing up will have far-reaching consequences for her. W e can conjecture that the absence of so many fathers in their young daughters' lives may allow these girls, once they are married, to feel generally quite comfortable about having their husbands more out of the home than in it. This results in even larger numbers of absent fathers, and the cycle continues. In addition, is it not possible that a lack of facility in communicating with males, which is something so many young women patients complain of in our offices, is a direct consequence of an earlier lack of day-to-day experiences with their fathers? For the son, the absent father often leaves some serious gaps in his awareness of what, as an authority, a father actually is and does. If the son sees the father ttt all, he often sees a tired father who comes to him briefly iust before bedtime, a father who may be minimally interested in the daily occurrences in his home. The young boy wonders what his father does away from home all day long, and, if there is also a serious lack of communication within the family, he begins to feel in time that his father is less important to him and to the functioning of the family than is his mother. Such a father seems literally unreal to the boy, a specter that comes and goes when the boy is asleep. This "absence" of the father does not permit the son to experience a very important element in his development--the opportunity to "bounce off" a male in give-and-take, of having limits set, discipline exercized, and thoughts and experiences shared. The father who is "absent" has difficulty in conveying a sense of reality to this family. The father who is "present" spells Reality for his son and the family, with a capital "R." There is no difference in the consequences to the b o y of the physically absent authority figure and the emotionally absent--although physically present--authority figure. The son who has not enjoyed a give-and-take relationship with his father cannot be expected to know what to do in turn as an authority with his own son. He will himself most likely be-
The Case of the Missing Male Authority
39
come the absent father and, as such, neglect in turn to provide his children with a sense of reality. What do we mean by a sense of reality? W e mean the awareness on the part of the child that fathers are people who are interested in the problems and day-to-day experiences of the family, who cope with financial decisions that affect the family, who enforce discipline, give and accept opinions, state convictions about life, religion, education, prejudices, politics, and take a stand on things that are important to the family as a whole and to an individual child in particular. By having his father "there" to impart all this, the son can view him as a conveyor of personal and social values and as an individual who has a stake in the realities of the world around him. Historically, it has been the man and not the woman who has gone out and confronted the real world. It has, therefore, been the father who has archetypically been able to acquire some of the important wherewithal to evaluate more concretely than the woman the world outside the family unit. I do not mean to imply by this that the woman does not have a sense of reality; she is certainly called upon to make reality decisions within the home; but, being so much in the home, she is often less cognizant of the problems in the world outside than is the man. There have been an adequate number of studies and evaluations o f the differences between the male and the female roles; and, while I do not feel it to be within the scope of this paper to present these materials at this point, I wish to state that I firmly believe that psychologically the woman's role has not been to convey reality to her children. Rather she is the one who, in the family group, often operating more on intuition, has been the conveyor of feelings and affection, and who, by virtue of her biologic child-bearing functions, has been generally less personally involved with the realities of the outside world than has the man. However, in view of the father's absence in recent times, the woman has been forced to operate as a disciplinarian and to be principally responsible for the rearing of the children. Although this position may be gratifying to some women, others have been unwilling to fill it. A number of subtle manifestations of this unwillingness have appeared. What are some of them? The woman who is forced into the unwanted role of authority figure
40
Journal of Religion and Health
may become subtly hostile to her children. She may carp at them a great deal, find fault with them, and become chronically argumentative. She may become overprotective. She may become overly permissive, because she really does not know how to be, or wish to be, the one to have exclusively to set reality and disciplinary limits. ~There are, of course, exceptions.) In time, the corrosive influences of permissiveness, overprotection, and hostility creep into the very fabric of the family. The child becomes aware of them, and the parents become increasingly helpless and powerless to assert themselves--especially now that, since the child senses his parents' plight, he may have become less manageable than he normally would be. Out of indecision, the parents do little or nothing. Some parents literally fear their children and refrain from asserting their authority for fear of doing their children emotional harm. What these parents do not realize is that this very "do-nothing" policy, this lack of stated and acted-on values--values to which they are obviously irrevocably committed--this fear to confront their children, this lack of communication are the very factors from which originate the seeds of destruction that will eventually grow in their children. As I have indicated in my paper on the disrelated youth,* the continued lack of communication between teen-agers and their parents eventually leads to mutual disregard and distrust. On the part of the child, this distrust easily translates itself into contempt, and this contempt extends to others outside the family--to the teacher in school, to the policeman and fireman on the street, to the faculty member on the university campus. Is it not possible that further evidence of the consequences of the missing male authority in the home is to be found not only in our disparagement and contempt for all authority, but also in the seeking on the part of some people for a dictator type of political authority, which thus compensates for the lack of authority they are experiencing in all other areas of their lives? Sadly, in these choices, they are confusing benevolence and firmness with tyranny and legitimate with illegitimate authority. If ministers, teachers, and psychoanalysts consider themselves to be legiti* Op. tit.
The Case of the Missing Male Authority
41
mate and rational authorities, then each must view himself as a carrier of values and as a responsible individual capable of setting limits and taking stands. This means that often the religious leader with his parishioners, the university professor with his students, and the psychoanalyst with his patients must come forward at times and speak out on his personal beliefs and conduct as a legitimate authority. The following incident, which took place within one of my therapy groups, may help to clarify what I mean. This particular group is composed of nine men and women who have known each other for approximately one year. The members come from a variety of walks of life, religious backgrounds, and parts of the country. Their marital status is also varied. The group is, in other words, a typical cosmopolitan gathering. One day, one of the members, a former rabbi, was arrested during a university campus rebellion. After his release on bail that same day, he was able to attend the therapy session. He showed up very upset and angry at the authorities. In the course of the session, he began to berate members of the group for their cowardice in not participating in the demonstration. Cross arguments and accusations followed, and the session began to take on some very angry overtones, bordering on violent assault, which, nevertheless, was not acted out because the group was aware that such behavior was not acceptable within a therapeutic situation. At a particular point, I interrupted the group to remind the patient that, as I had told him on a number of other occasions, his continued seeking out of, and placing himself in, potentially violent situations could eventually lead to serious personal injury to himself. He had been fired from a number of jobs, was unable to function as a rabbi, had been asked to leave a university because of academic failures, and had once before been arrested during a peace demonstration. I did not, however, during the session I am describing, enter into the rightness or wrongness of his social beliefs; rather I pointed out to him his failure to take responsibility for his continued acting-out and his unwillingness to recognize the terrible problem he had with authority of any kind; I told him
42
Journal o( Religion and Health
that the current arrest was just one more manifestation of his hostility in his long line of antiauthority outbursts. This stand on my part prompted an uproar within the group. I was accused of being a dictator, of not permitting the patient freedom of expression, of feeling threatened by his strength of conviction, and of being, among other things, "an archeonservative representative of the middle class." The men in the group, with the exception of the patient, were on the 9 quiet, coming wholly neither to his defense nor mine. They took equivocating, rational positions and attempted to discuss the pros and cons of the various extreme views that had been verbalized. For my part, I very loudly and angrily held to my point of view that the patient's outburst, his insistence on the rightness of his behavior and position were not only an irrational denial of what he repetitively acted upon, but were also potentially suicidal in nature. All in all, I can say, it was quite a session. What did I, as well as the group, learn in retrospect from this incident? For one thing, the outbreak was seen as a replica of what the patient experienced in his home. His mother and older sisters (coincidentally, four out of the five women in the group were on his side during the confrontation) had pampered and supported him, while his father, symbolically represented by the men in the group, had hidden behind his evening newspaper. There was a major difference, however, between the group situation and the original home skuation--me, the therapist. I, unlike his father, took a definke and firm stand. I let him know that if he continued in his behavior he would one day get himself into serious difficulties. I firmly believe that by doing this I was not only being the psychoanalyst, but I was taking the position in the group of a legkimate, concerned, and involved male authority. Gradually, the rationality of my stand and my concern for his welfare became apparent to him. Certainly, many transference and countertransference dynamics, which are not within the scope of this paper, were present. After 9some time, a number of important aspects of his life became clearer to him. He began to see how much of his behavior was caused by his resentment against the father who was more or less physically present but emotionally absent
The Case of the Missing Male Authority
43
even when he was at home. (The father was a service station owner and worked long hours seven days a week.) The patient came to understand that during the group session on the day of his arrest, we had become to him personifications of the absent father, the overprotective mother, and the nonparticipants of his family. In time, he also recognized that almost invariably in his childhood it had been the women of his household who had taken over concern with family matters and discipline, because the father was "too busy at the service station." Parenthetically, I wonder how often juvenile delinquency, street gangs, dropouts, and the hippie phenomenon can be explained in part as a young man's venting his anger on society because the reality-and-value-giving man had not been available to him in his childhood. I, for one, have found time and again that the young person eventually responds to structure, concern, understanding, awareness, even discipline, when these are given in a rational manner. Certainly, these are not to be found in the home lacking a legitimate authority. And certainly, the most healthy growing up of both boys and girls requires that this authority be a male.
