OEDIPAL MALE
You can look up the original story of Oedipus Rex, a play by Sophocles some 2400 years ago.
The short form is Oedipus is an abandoned child who grows up suspecting he’s adopted. One thing leads to another and he ends up killing his real father in a quarrel over who has the right of way out on the road. Then he goes to the city of Thebes, solves the riddle posed by the Sphinx devouring humans at its entrance to get in, and is awarded the kingdom and its Queen.
Sure enough, the Queen is his mother, recently widowed after her King is killed while out on the road by you know who… When the gig is up, she hangs herself for banging her own son and he gouges out his eyes in disgrace for breaking the incest taboo. Fucking Greeks eh?
Freud seized upon this tragedy to speak of the Oedipal male: the boy in love with his mother and who secretly hates his father while seeing him as a rival for her love.
This my friends, lies at the core of male weakness all over the world. Man boys get stuck here.
My son was five when he overheard me call missus my woman at the supper table. “Dad,” he said, “Mommy is MY woman” he insisted. What ensued was the sweetest exchange between father and son, a push and pull that has gone on for two years (and is still ongoing).
Last year, I overheard him telling his mother he was going to marry her when he grew up. She told him she couldn’t but that he would always be her “Little Bear.” That’s her pet name for him.
Over the past two years he’s grown more accustomed to me. I’ve taught him a few things and let him hit the heavy bag in the garage. He accompanied me on walks after dark in the forest, testing the limits of his fear. He pushes the 5 lbs. dumbbells in my office. He tells me of how he will defeat all sorts of imaginary enemies. Now he sits with me on the couch sometimes. Recently, just to see, I asked him about whose woman mommy was, he told me, “How about we share her…” He is making progress.
And of course we do share her. Just as surely as he will slowly withdraw from the influence of his mother over the coming years and come more and more under mine. He will need this as the demands of life on a little boy add up and compound through adolescence to where he requires the powerful masculine to help him negotiate obstacles that are sure to be in his path.
This is the “cure” for the oedipal male: to move away from the feminine and towards the masculine. It is every male’s rite of passage, a necessity of male maturation. For now my son must bask in the glory of feeling fully loved by his mom. He must see her as his primary “angel of mercy” as she nurses him through his first ten years. He is delicate of heart, and my son’s medical conditions mean his mother is vigilant and near. He is secure in her love and attention and his confidence shows it. He’s fearless with people, will talk to anyone. And day by day he gains more masculine power from the safety of her support.
But eventually, her love and attention will suffocate him. His lifeforce will be that much stronger for having had her in his corner, as a foundation of security and tenderness he may call upon forever more. However, he will need to shed her chaos and move towards masculine order to find meaning and freedom.
At some point, the boy must leave the mother to become a man.
Absent this natural transition, and without this period of reveling in the embrace and security of her feminine love, the danger is that he will seek her out in others for many years.
Some men do this for life, and never get the message, never feeling satiated, carrying a mother wanting with them into every decade and into every failed or unsatisfying relationship. Every addict and pick up artist suffers from this effect. Many other men are needy and weak or tyrants and aloof. It’s the mother wound: a maelstrom of confusion and anxiety and expectations and fear…
And just as it is natural for my little boy to slowly move into the masculine, such is the cure for the adult Oedipal male. He must find men and learn to absorb the masculine while abandoning his over-reliance on the feminine. He must confront his weakness and find his power. He must reclaim his masculinity while getting out from under the spellbinding power of the feminine. Later he finds his own feminine aspect rather than look for his mother in others. The anima. He welcomes back his feminine side only after first finding his masculine.
He must reverse the flow. He grows to no longer expect love at all, but rather realizes he has an abundant reserve of masculine power and love within him to share with others. He must get out of his head and instead, open his heart. Not to receive, but to give.
He uses his power and love in service of himself and others to find meaning and freedom.
For he realizes that the only person in the world upon whom he may reliably count on with any confidence for unconditional love is himself.
Anything less and he remains a boy…
Stay powerful, never give up, This is the day…
©2021 CHRISTOPHER K WALLACE
