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There is no more timely or sensitive an issue than the need for space and a facilitating language in which to discuss what it is that distinguishes men from women. Robert May, a psychotherapist and director of counseling and of mental health services at Amherst
College, has compiled well—documented evidence ranging from Greek mythology to the new androgyny on patterns of male and female development. Taking his stand at the psychoanalytic end of the ideological continuum he develops the premise that there are significant psychological differences between the sexes and that what is known as male and female is the result of the interplay of our bodies and our social reality. May takes issue with this statement from Kate Millet's, Sexual Politics: “For the sexes are inherently in everything alike, save reproductive systems, secondary sexual characteristics, orgasmic capacity, and genetic and morphological structure,” as being representative of the position that sex differences are caused exclusively by social conditioning.
In exploring the experiences of maleness and femaleness May reminds us of the archetypal male and female myths of Phaeton and Demeter. The myth of Phaeton who drove the chariot of his father, the sun god, warns of the potential destructiveness of unmodulated pride. The myth of Demeter shows caring confirmed, endurance rewarded, and suffering followed by joy. The characteristics of today's male and female patterns of fantasy are studied through extensive projective testing and the results are reported in detail. The invented stories bear a good deal of similarity to the themes of the Greek myths, and these patterns are found to be evident as early as age six and to peak at adolescence. The underlying pathology of extreme versions of both male and female fantasy patterns is described in two case histories, and the possibility for individual variation and overlap between the sexes on almost every dimension is carefully noted.
The ways in which culture an