A vital part of a man's masculinity is caught up in how potent or impotent he feels as a man with something to impart, and that may be the archetypal definition of what a father is, since it applies equally to men who have never had children and to men who have. It is very important to recognize a man's need to involve himself in what might be imaged in the totem pole, which shows a vertical succession of ancestors, one standing on top of another. This totemic succession is a good image of the patriarchal transmission, which rests on the home truth that each generation of men stands on the shoulders of the last. This may be especially precious to men, because the notion of what a father is actually changes with each generation and so is in greater danger of getting lost than the idea of what a mother is, which seems to endure with less change across cultures over time.
— John Beebe
Beebe is pointing at something men rarely name directly: the wound that opens when a man feels he has nothing to impart. Not failure in the ordinary sense, but a specific deprivation — the sense that the line of transmission has been severed, that no one handed anything forward to him, and so he stands with nothing to pass on. The totem pole image makes this visible. Each figure in that stack is both receiver and transmitter; potency, here, is relational all the way down, not a property the man generates alone.
What makes this complicated is that the notion of fatherhood — unlike motherhood, which carries biological anchoring across cultures — has to be re-invented by each generation. The content changes. What a father is has to be actively re-discovered, not simply inherited intact. That re-discovery is where the danger lives, because when transmission breaks — when a man cannot locate what was given to him — the need to impart does not disappear; it goes underground, or turns to compulsion, or attaches to inappropriate surrogates. The psyche will find something to be potent about. Beebe's quiet suggestion is that recognizing the need honestly, before the substitutions begin, is already most of the work.
John Beebe·Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness·2017