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Before I had finished the Introduction I felt I was reading an important book, a substantial and valuable contribution. Although some chapters are a bit patchy, by the time I had turned the last page of Monick's book my sense of its importance had not been lessened. There were moments when I felt I had not been presented with such important new material—to which my soul responded with the delight of ‘rightness’—since first reading some parts of Jung and Neumann. I recognise that this high valuation may well be because I am a man: even within that limitation I may be responding for nearly half the human race.
In addition to this, it is well written by an author who comes across as an intelligent and unpretentious man, formerly an Episcopalian priest and now a Jungian analyst in Scranton, Pennsylvania and New York.
It is all really rather simple—and I say this not in disparagement, but in admiration: things seem simple and obvious once they are ready to be known. But someone has to be the one to say it, and that is what Monick has done.
His essential statement is that the patriarchal values are under assault and crumbling; that too many men have identified masculinity too much with patriarchy; that there is a need, mainly perhaps in men but also in women, to distinguish the masculine from the patriarchal and to integrate awareness of it (i.e., the masculine) and its chthonic divinity.
This he does by examining ‘phallos’ as the masculine godhead and emblem. He portrays the division, religiously, culturally, and psychologically, between chthonic phallos in sexuality and solar phallos as word, institution, and order.
Smiting Neumann lustily, he uses Jung's conceptual tool of the ‘psychoid’ and of ‘transgressivity’ (I am grateful to Monick for bringing this valuable notion to my attention: somehow I had overlooked it) to re-vision the maternal and feminine nature of the unconscious as both feminine and masculine. This clears the way for a different understanding of the heroic