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Teachers and mentors are generally held in low social esteem in the United States. There is a canard which suggests: “Those who cannot—teach.” Yet it is a usual enough occurrence for students to have been touched in depth by a mentor and to have their ontic thrust furthered and life course altered by such contact. Therapists at large do not generally describe themselves as mentors, in fact, shy away from such a tight social identification. They find their professional identity, their charisma, their healing power in a seemingly more esoteric and mysterious process than an ordinary learning or educational phenomenon affords. Even the behavioral modifiers, who rarely project themselves as modern incarnations of Anton Mesmer, act as social engineers of a special sort rather than as teachers. But Levinson, who has been studying intensively forty men between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five, finds a new dynamic significance in the concept of mentoring, and this has been confirmed in our own sample of men and women between the ages of thirty and forty.1,2 Levinson says:
We have been greatly impressed by the role of the mentor, and by developmental changes in relationships with mentors, and in the capability to be a mentor…. We use the term in a more complex psychosocial sense. The presence or absence of mentors is, we find, an important component of the life course during the 20's and 30's. The absence of mentors is associated with various kinds of developmental impairments and with problems of individuation in midlife. The mentor is ordinarily eight to fifteen years older than the mentee. He is enough older to represent greater wisdom, authority, and paternal qualities, but near enough in age or attitudes to be in some respects a peer or older brother rather than in the image of wise old man or distant father.1
The autobiographies of famous writers and playwrights, among them Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, all reveal t