The -F-r-a-c-t-u-r-e-d- Male Ego

Here is a middle-of-the-week fairy-tale for all of you; feel free to 'read' it as mythical, genealogical, archaeological, farcical, mythological, ironical, literal, sociological, philosophical, comical, historical, or a mixture of all of these.

In the beginning was the Man, and the Man was with Himself, and the Man was God. And yet, the Man was alone ('alone = all + one'). One day, however, the Man stumbled over a Woman in the course of his explorations, and in confrontation with this Woman the Man at once became aware of his loss of suzerainty and autonomy. This experience painfully shook him out of his narcissistic stupor and cast him on the wild seas of anxiety and fear in the face of the Other, the Woman, whom he had to dominate and repress to the farthest corners of his world.

Consequently, the Man's world became one where there could be neither mother, nor sister, nor wife; and where he would allow the Woman to define herself only with respect to what she does not have, that is, autonomy and independence. Thus, the Woman is banned from the realm of the public to that of the private, from the light of culture to the darkness of nature, from the glories of civilisation to the barbarism of the curse of repetitive reproduction. The Man lives in the domain of justice which is characterised by change, historicity and novelty, while the Woman pines away in the shelter of intimacy which is the frigid zone frozen in time.

However. However, this fissure between the public realm of the Man and the private domain of the Woman is internalised by the Man so that a parallel dichotomy opens up within the Man who is himself split between the public official and the private individual. There rages deep within the Man a titanic clash between the clarity of reason and the darkness of emotion, between the instrumentality of cognitive thought and the bonding of empathetic relatedness, between the glorification of his autonomy and independence and the desire for receptivity and responsiveness.

Since then, so we are told (by whom? by the Woman, of course), the Male Ego has always been -f-r-a-c-t-u-r-e-d-.