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. The son's fear that the absent father is evil contributed to student takeovers in the sixties. Rebellious students at Columbia University took over the president's office looking for evidence of CIA involvement with the university. The students' fear that their own fathers were evil was transferred to all male figures in authority. A university, like a father, looks upright and decent on the outside, but underneath, somewhere, you have the feeling that it and he are doing something demonic. That feeling becomes intolerable because the son's inner intuitions become incongruous with outer appearances. The unconscious intuitions come in, not because the father is wicked, but because the father is remote. Jung people go to the trouble of invading the president's office to bridge this incongruity. The country being what it is, occasionally they do find letters from the CIA, but this doesn't satisfy the deeper longing-the need of the son's body to be closer to the father's body. "Where is my father... why doesn't he love me? What is going on?" The movie called The Marathon Man concentrates on the Jung American male's suspicion of older men. The main character, played by Dustin Hoffman, loses his father, a leftist driven to suicide in the McCarthy era. The plot puts the Jung man in dangerous contact with a former concentration camp doctor, whom Hoffman must confront and defeat before he can have any peace with his own dead father. When the demons are so suspicious, how can the son later make any good connection with adult male energy, especially the energy of an adult man in a position of authority or leadership? As a musician he will smash handcrafted guitars made by old men, or as a teacher suspicious of older writers he will "deconstruct" them. As a citizen he will take part in therapy rather than politics. He will feel purer when not in authority. He will go to northern California and raise marijuana, or ride three-wheelers in Maine. There's a general assumption now that every man in a position of power is or will soon be corrupt and oppressive. Yet the Greeks understood and praised a positive male energy that has accepted authority. They called it Zeus energy, which encompasses intelligence, robust health, compassionate decisiveness, good will, generous leadership. Zeus energy is male authority accepted for the sake of the community. The native Americans believe in that healthful male power. Among the Senecas, the chief-a man, but chosen by the women-accepts power for the sake of the community. He himself owns virtually nothing. All the great cultures except ours preserve and have lived with images of this positive male energy. Zeus energy has been steadily disintegrating decade after decade in the United States. Popular culture has been determined to destroy respect for it, beginning with the "Maggie and Jiggs" and "Blondie and Dagwood" comics of the 1920s and 1930s, in which the man is always weak and foolish. From there the image of the weak adult man went into animated cartoons. The father in contemporary TV ads never knows what cold medicine to take. And in situation comedies, The Cosby Show notwithstanding, men are devious, bumbling, or easy to outwit. It is the women who outwit them, and teach them a lesson, or hold the whole town together all by themselves. This is not exactly "what people want." Many Jung Hollywood writers, rather than confront their fathers in Kansas, take revenge on the remote father by making all adult men look like fools. They attack the respect for masculine integrity that every father, underneath, wants to pass on to his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. By contrast, in traditional cultures, the older men and the older women often are the first to speak in public gatherings; younger men may say nothing but still aim to maintain contact with the older men. Now we have twenty-seven-year-olds engaged in hostile takeovers who will buy out a publishing house and dismantle in six months what an older man has created over a period of thirty years. I offered my help in undermining Zeus energy during my twenties and thirties. I attacked every older man in the literary community who was within arrow range, and enjoyed seeing the arrows pass through his body, arrows impelled by the tense energy bottled in my psyche. I saw many parts of my father's daytime life, his work habits, and his generous attitude toward working men; but he was inaccessible in some other way, and the hole in me filled with demons, as Mitscherlich predicted. Older men whom I hardly knew received the anger. When a son acts on that fear of demonism it makes him flat, stale, isolated, and dry. He doesn't know how to recover his wet and muddy portion. A few years ago, I began to feel my diminishment, not so much on my "feminine" side as on my masculine side. I found myself missing contact with men-or should I say my father?

— Robert Bly

Robert Bly·Iron John: A Book About Men·1990

• Father Complex