Reflection

Men Need Men: Competition, Initiation and the Boys in Men's Bodies

Men live, most of their lives, in a fear they rarely name: the fear of being discovered less than. Less strong, less clever, less successful, less of a man, physically or psychologically, than the man in front of them. It is one of the quietest and most universal things I meet in my consulting room, and it shapes male life from the playground to the boardroom.

And so, when two men meet, a competition starts. Not always, and not always openly: if the distance between them is vast, a very wealthy man and a man with nothing, there may be no contest to have. But put two men anywhere near the same prize, in sport, in business, in academia, and the measuring begins, almost by reflex. Every other man is a rival in waiting, and, worse, a potential witness: the one who might see through the performance and discover the boy behind it.

The paradox: men need men

Here is the paradox, and it is the heart of this essay. The very creature a man is built to compete with is the one he needs in order to be healthy. Men need men. They need allies, witnesses, elders, friends who know the same fear from the inside. The competition and the need are the same current, read in opposite directions, and a culture that leaves men only the competition, without the belonging, produces exactly what we see around us: the loneliest generation of men there has ever been.

The first half: allies for the quest

In the first half of life, this need takes one shape. The young man is on the hero’s quest, and I mean that precisely: he must create his life, find his work, build his kingdom, win his princess. For that he needs a strong ego, an ego is not the enemy in a twenty-five-year-old, it is the vehicle, and he needs allies: the brothers-in-arms, the rivals who sharpen him, the men beside whom he measures and builds. Competition, at this age, is half the point. It is one of the ways young men love each other.

The second half: the homecoming

But around the middle of life, the movement reverses, and this is where so many men lose their way. The ego that was inflated by the heroic journey, by the achievements, the titles, the kingdom built, must now be deflated, at least in part. It must diminish enough for the man to come back home within himself: to stop identifying with what he has done and begin to internalise who he has become. This is the real task of the second half, and it cannot be done with the first half’s tools. At the end of a life, the accounting is not what you did, and not what you have. It is who you became.

The lost rites of passage

For almost the whole of human history, men did not face any of this alone, and they did not cross from boyhood to manhood unwitnessed. Every culture had its structures. The elders of the tribe sat together, speaking and sharing, a council of men who had made the crossing. Later there were the guilds and the brotherhoods: men gathered as men, with rank and ritual and transmission. And at the centre of it all stood the rite of passage: the boy taken away from the village by the old men, put through an ordeal, and returned, and everyone knew, he most of all, that a man had come back. Even in our own recent world, military service did that work crudely, and sometimes at a terrible cost, for a boy could go and a wounded man return. But the structure itself was an initiation, and everyone understood it as one.

Almost none of it exists today. We abolished the elders and the ordeal in the same gesture, and we replaced them with nothing. The consequence walks past you on every street: men who were never, at any moment, made men by anyone.

No ritual, more imposters

And this is where the lost initiation joins the fear I began with. A man who was never made a man has no inner certificate to point to when the doubt arrives. There was no threshold, no ordeal, no elder who looked at him and said: you have crossed. So the question stays open his whole life, and the imposter feeling I have described in successful men, the director who feels like a fraud, the trader waiting to be found out, is not only personal history. It is structural. A culture without rites of passage breeds imposters wholesale, for no man is ever given the moment that would have settled the question. More men walking, feeling like boys.

Where the initiation went

So where does a man go now to be made a man, or, at midlife, to be unmade and remade? I think the honest answer is that the initiatory function did not disappear; it went underground, and it survives in a few places. One of them is the work I do. Analysis, at its best, carries what the rite of passage once carried: a space set apart from the village, the temenos; an ordeal that is real, the descent into one’s own underworld; and an elder who has made the crossing himself and can accompany rather than instruct. When a man does that work, something settles that no promotion ever settled: the question of whether he is a man is no longer put to the audience; it finds its answer within.

And the other place is the oldest technology men possess: other men. A men’s group, a real one, where the competition is set down at the door and the fear of being less-than can finally be spoken, does for men what nothing else does, because the witnesses are the very creatures the fear was about. Men need men. They needed them at the fire, they needed them on the quest, and they need them now, in a culture that has forgotten why it ever gathered them together.

My work with men has its own dedicated practice: Men Who Heal.