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This book is essentially about David Tacey's sense of the re-emergence of the ‘spirit of the feminine’ in all forms of cultural, political and personal experience. It seeks to direct our hearing towards this ‘spirit’, by arguing passionately and convincingly that contemporary theorising, such as the popular ‘mythopoetic’ men's movement and academic feminism, cannot give us workable solutions to the demise of patriarchy.
Tacey who teaches Jungian and Psychoanalytic Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne, outlines his arguments in a ‘polemical introduction’, arguing that both of these positions leave us with an arid and, at times, deadly regression to archaic archetypal projections and splits. The new tradition of mythopoetic writers, spearheaded by Robert Bly, have attempted to solve the contemporary ‘crisis’ of masculinity by invoking masculine archetypes through the invention of pseudo-Jungian terms such as the ‘Deep Male’, or the ‘Inner Warrior’. In an expanding series of books and articles, this movement seeks to alert men to the ever growing threat of ‘feminisation’ and offers men a reconnection to the archetypal father deep within.
For Tacey this regressive and anti-psychological stance towards an idealised illusory father, simply leads men away from any deep and lasting understanding of their personal, political and social location within society. Tacey argues that ‘Sons must not simply repeat the traditional pattern and become part of the father's tribe’. They must rebuild and redeem the past, but not in an uncritical accommodation to it.
At the other extreme lies the pro-feminist agenda. Through academic debate, writers discourse about ways to overthrow patriarchy, defeat the father's authority, and argue for a revolutionary politics steeped in what Tacey calls ‘Oedipal colourings’ (p. 6). This agenda, he feels, is also regressive, and unconsciously pushes us back into Oedipal guilt through patricide. ‘The defence of the feminine’, says Tacey, ‘is actually a