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The fantasy self-image of the hero is common to many men. When these men come to psychotherapy, they present a variety of symptoms that may be linked to this self-image. These include grandiosity, the need to control the therapist, empty depression, and a preoccupation with the imagery of death and battle. These patients tend to evoke in the therapist emotional responses that the patients subsequently deny. These characteristics are so pervasive among men that they may be endemic to manhood.
The heroic model of manhood is an attempt to strengthen and stabilize the gendered self-representation. Because fathers tend to be absent from the nurturing matrix, their sons have little early experience in an affective, preverbal relationship of mutual influence with another who is essentially like themselves yet outside their omnipotent control. Men, therefore, are raised with a pervasive experience of “otherness,” their infantile experience and affectivity forever trapped in the world of women. Although the yearning of men for their fathers is recognized in psychoanalytic theory, the wish for the nurturing father has been underemphasized. The underemphasis causes the analyst to miss, or misunderstand, important transferential constellations.