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[Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity (Perigee)] [By: Pittman, Frank] [October, 1994]
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June 12, 2025
A PSYCHIATRIST LOOKS AT VARIOUS ASPECTS OF THE FATHER/SON RELATIONSHIP
Frank Pittman (1935-2012) was a psychiatrist, who also wrote a column which appeared in ‘Psychology Today’ magazine.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 1993 book, “[This book] has been painful and enlightening for me to write, and it has taken a while… For the last few years, masculinity has dominated my conversation with my friends and family, the therapy I have done with my patients, the workshops I have given around the country and abroad. The struggle to be a man that is presented here is not a clinical oddity: it is the norm. It is, of course, my own struggle as much as it is any man’s, so much of the book is my often embarrassing autobiography. The men in this book come not only from my family and my life, but from the lives of the men I have seen in my practice over the past thirty years, men under the sway of the ‘masculine mystique,’ men who try to be ‘man enough’ to win the love of women and the acceptance of men, and even a measure of heroism in the world, but who overdo their approximation of masculinity in a way that can become pathological.” (Pg. 20-21)
He explains, “Masculinity becomes a problem when men, and women, venerate and exaggerate all that is masculine, i.e., the ‘masculine mystique.’ Civilization… has been a predominantly male affair, and men deserve most of the credit and most of the blame for what we have done to ourselves, to one another, and to the world, as we strive to tame nature and leave our mark on all we survey. The men who are messing up their lives, their families, and their world in their quest to feel man enough are not exercising true masculinity, but a grotesque exaggeration of what they think a man is. When we see men overdoing their masculinity, we can assume that they haven’t been raised by men, that they have taken cultural stereotypes literally, and that they are scared they aren’t being manly enough..
“Why do men love their masculinity so much? Because men have been trained to sacrifice their lives for their masculinity, and men always know that they are far less masculine than they think they should be. Women, though, have the power to give a man his masculinity or take it away, so women become both terrifyingly important and terrifyingly dangerous to men. It’s all quite crazy, but this, too, is a part of the ‘masculine mystique.’” (Pg. 16-17)
He acknowledges, “Ultimately, we’re not going to raise a better class of men until we have a better class of fathers, fathers who don’t run out on the job. Our fathers didn’t teach us how to live with our masculinity, and mothers and our wives, no matter how hard they try, can’t do it, either. So even if we remain terrified of women, we have to stop blaming them for what we’ve become, and stop expecting them to fix us.” (Pg. 44)
He observes, “Obviously, if men can stake their sense of themselves on their ability to control a woman’s sexuality or weight, they are willing to try to control anything. And sometimes they do. They may try to battle nature and rid a lawn of anything they themselves didn’t put there. They may try to make their surly kids become champions at whatever interests the father. They may even battle against traffic and try to make sure all the other frustrated drivers behave with impeccable manners. Some battle over time, getting huffy if someone is running late to see them, as if the punctuality of others were a measure of their worth as men.” (Pg. 93)
He notes, “Robert Bly is an heroic figure, symbolizing the father so few of us had, but he can’t be the father of us all, or even our personal mentor. I’m with Bly in believing that, in the absence of fathers, what the world needs is not more distant mothers or more subservient wives but a better class of male mentors, something each of us can do for one another. While Bly calls it the ‘male mother,’ what he is striving for is a more nurturing model of masculinity.” (Pg. 136)
He summarizes, “it is not enough for the boy to win his father’s love and anointment and be declared man enough by his father. He must also satisfy his mother, pay her back for her sacrifice for him… Even that is not enough. He must become a man among men. He must establish sufficient brotherhood with his buddies to join the men’s team in life… It takes the fulfillment of all those relationships for a boy to become a man who is able to live in peace and cooperation with his community and to give something back to his family. But if there is a failure in the father-son bonding, the rest of the boy’s tasks will be distorted. If his father has abandoned his mother, he may find her impossible to satisfy and leave. The unanointed boy is likely to feel shame or distrust with the other boys and shrink away from their brotherhood or compete with them too fiercely. If his Father Hunger is too intense, he may choose unattainable heroes and take them far too literally. Without a father, he may never become a man.” (Pg. 142)
He points out, “Brothers love and rescue each other, but they also fight; they learn to contend through their rivalries. Brothers insult one another; the insults are toughening, and the boys can’t be friends until they can accept insults without crying to Mama. But the insults are also a compliment to one another’s masculinity. To insult a friend implies that you respect his masculinity enough to know he can take it without acting like a crybaby. The swapping of insults, like the fighting between brothers, becomes the seal of male bonding.” (Pg. 167)
He asserts, “Male friendships are not like female friendships: men are not likely to have confidants as they are to have playmates. Most of the time male friendships don’t need to be like female friendships. Men can silently assume that we have all been through the same ordeals and we all feel pretty much the same about everything. Being together and not having to talk about it is wonderfully comfortable. I sometimes think that if men didn’t talk to women, they might not talk to anybody: they might go through life telling dirty jokes and quoting baseball statistics to one another. Sometimes there is something that a man needs to reveal, needs to talk over with another man, and there may be no man available to him. Sometimes, manhood is lonely.” (Pg. 178)
He admits, “There is a strangely pervasive fear of being a father. We might call it ‘patriphobia.’ Patriphobia takes a variety of forms… [Some] men want to be their own pampered child, or that of some woman, but they don’t want to grow up. They think they will have a happier life if they refuse to develop any further. A real child would be competition for him, and would expect him to become an adult. It isn’t that these patriphobic guys are doing something so important, like… stopping the erosion of the ozone layer, that they can’t be distracted by children; they have a full-time job not growing up. The women and children from whom these men run may think they are at fault somehow, that men break their commitments to them because they aren’t worthy of being a part of the man’s life. Actually, the problem with patriphobic men lies not with the women he escapes or the children he abandons but with his relationship with his own father, who left him with the feeling that being a father is a burden.” (Pg. 250-251)
He wonders, “Will this generation discover the healing power of fatherhood? As I look at the young men coming into manhood now, I see many patriphobic guys running from fathering, but I also see the ones who are willing to risk equality with a woman. They end up being hands-on fathers in a way that was rare in my generation… My son and son-in-law and nephews are yearning for children, not just children to have but children to raise. They are not alone. I feel optimistic about the sort of fathering these guys will do. The trend is clear: the boys who got fathered want to be fathers, and the boys who didn’t fear it.” (Pg. 253)
This book will be of great interest to anyone interested in the relation between fathers and other males.
Frank Pittman (1935-2012) was a psychiatrist, who also wrote a column which appeared in ‘Psychology Today’ magazine.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 1993 book, “[This book] has been painful and enlightening for me to write, and it has taken a while… For the last few years, masculinity has dominated my conversation with my friends and family, the therapy I have done with my patients, the workshops I have given around the country and abroad. The struggle to be a man that is presented here is not a clinical oddity: it is the norm. It is, of course, my own struggle as much as it is any man’s, so much of the book is my often embarrassing autobiography. The men in this book come not only from my family and my life, but from the lives of the men I have seen in my practice over the past thirty years, men under the sway of the ‘masculine mystique,’ men who try to be ‘man enough’ to win the love of women and the acceptance of men, and even a measure of heroism in the world, but who overdo their approximation of masculinity in a way that can become pathological.” (Pg. 20-21)
He explains, “Masculinity becomes a problem when men, and women, venerate and exaggerate all that is masculine, i.e., the ‘masculine mystique.’ Civilization… has been a predominantly male affair, and men deserve most of the credit and most of the blame for what we have done to ourselves, to one another, and to the world, as we strive to tame nature and leave our mark on all we survey. The men who are messing up their lives, their families, and their world in their quest to feel man enough are not exercising true masculinity, but a grotesque exaggeration of what they think a man is. When we see men overdoing their masculinity, we can assume that they haven’t been raised by men, that they have taken cultural stereotypes literally, and that they are scared they aren’t being manly enough..
“Why do men love their masculinity so much? Because men have been trained to sacrifice their lives for their masculinity, and men always know that they are far less masculine than they think they should be. Women, though, have the power to give a man his masculinity or take it away, so women become both terrifyingly important and terrifyingly dangerous to men. It’s all quite crazy, but this, too, is a part of the ‘masculine mystique.’” (Pg. 16-17)
He acknowledges, “Ultimately, we’re not going to raise a better class of men until we have a better class of fathers, fathers who don’t run out on the job. Our fathers didn’t teach us how to live with our masculinity, and mothers and our wives, no matter how hard they try, can’t do it, either. So even if we remain terrified of women, we have to stop blaming them for what we’ve become, and stop expecting them to fix us.” (Pg. 44)
He observes, “Obviously, if men can stake their sense of themselves on their ability to control a woman’s sexuality or weight, they are willing to try to control anything. And sometimes they do. They may try to battle nature and rid a lawn of anything they themselves didn’t put there. They may try to make their surly kids become champions at whatever interests the father. They may even battle against traffic and try to make sure all the other frustrated drivers behave with impeccable manners. Some battle over time, getting huffy if someone is running late to see them, as if the punctuality of others were a measure of their worth as men.” (Pg. 93)
He notes, “Robert Bly is an heroic figure, symbolizing the father so few of us had, but he can’t be the father of us all, or even our personal mentor. I’m with Bly in believing that, in the absence of fathers, what the world needs is not more distant mothers or more subservient wives but a better class of male mentors, something each of us can do for one another. While Bly calls it the ‘male mother,’ what he is striving for is a more nurturing model of masculinity.” (Pg. 136)
He summarizes, “it is not enough for the boy to win his father’s love and anointment and be declared man enough by his father. He must also satisfy his mother, pay her back for her sacrifice for him… Even that is not enough. He must become a man among men. He must establish sufficient brotherhood with his buddies to join the men’s team in life… It takes the fulfillment of all those relationships for a boy to become a man who is able to live in peace and cooperation with his community and to give something back to his family. But if there is a failure in the father-son bonding, the rest of the boy’s tasks will be distorted. If his father has abandoned his mother, he may find her impossible to satisfy and leave. The unanointed boy is likely to feel shame or distrust with the other boys and shrink away from their brotherhood or compete with them too fiercely. If his Father Hunger is too intense, he may choose unattainable heroes and take them far too literally. Without a father, he may never become a man.” (Pg. 142)
He points out, “Brothers love and rescue each other, but they also fight; they learn to contend through their rivalries. Brothers insult one another; the insults are toughening, and the boys can’t be friends until they can accept insults without crying to Mama. But the insults are also a compliment to one another’s masculinity. To insult a friend implies that you respect his masculinity enough to know he can take it without acting like a crybaby. The swapping of insults, like the fighting between brothers, becomes the seal of male bonding.” (Pg. 167)
He asserts, “Male friendships are not like female friendships: men are not likely to have confidants as they are to have playmates. Most of the time male friendships don’t need to be like female friendships. Men can silently assume that we have all been through the same ordeals and we all feel pretty much the same about everything. Being together and not having to talk about it is wonderfully comfortable. I sometimes think that if men didn’t talk to women, they might not talk to anybody: they might go through life telling dirty jokes and quoting baseball statistics to one another. Sometimes there is something that a man needs to reveal, needs to talk over with another man, and there may be no man available to him. Sometimes, manhood is lonely.” (Pg. 178)
He admits, “There is a strangely pervasive fear of being a father. We might call it ‘patriphobia.’ Patriphobia takes a variety of forms… [Some] men want to be their own pampered child, or that of some woman, but they don’t want to grow up. They think they will have a happier life if they refuse to develop any further. A real child would be competition for him, and would expect him to become an adult. It isn’t that these patriphobic guys are doing something so important, like… stopping the erosion of the ozone layer, that they can’t be distracted by children; they have a full-time job not growing up. The women and children from whom these men run may think they are at fault somehow, that men break their commitments to them because they aren’t worthy of being a part of the man’s life. Actually, the problem with patriphobic men lies not with the women he escapes or the children he abandons but with his relationship with his own father, who left him with the feeling that being a father is a burden.” (Pg. 250-251)
He wonders, “Will this generation discover the healing power of fatherhood? As I look at the young men coming into manhood now, I see many patriphobic guys running from fathering, but I also see the ones who are willing to risk equality with a woman. They end up being hands-on fathers in a way that was rare in my generation… My son and son-in-law and nephews are yearning for children, not just children to have but children to raise. They are not alone. I feel optimistic about the sort of fathering these guys will do. The trend is clear: the boys who got fathered want to be fathers, and the boys who didn’t fear it.” (Pg. 253)
This book will be of great interest to anyone interested in the relation between fathers and other males.
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