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The central theme in the book is the male struggle to reach and maintain an integrated self identity, to be an I. According to Freud's well-known definition the ability to love and work are the most important characteristics of a healthy adult identity. Male destinies, as Manninen describes them, show the mutually dependent relationship between these two capacities. He maintains that self-identity is based on the feeling of self-determination. Following Freud he asserts that our ego is formed when we are trying to cope with those three independent realities: one's own body, external nature and the fact of other peoples' individual psychic existence. These powers are constantly threatening our identity, our feeling of self-determination.
Submitting to our imperfections on all these fronts is the only permanently progressive solution. It emancipates the individual to relative autonomy and individual responsibility and makes possible the recognition of one's own neediness. This is the basis on which the striving for good contact with reality can be built (p. 53).
Manninen focuses on the conditions that are necessary for the ego to give up the striving for omnipotence and to be satisfied with what people and nature give us, when their independent existence is acknowledged.