The Ninth Street Center What People Say About Us

The Living Room Mysteries
by Graham Jackson

The feminine man's preeminent need is, to use the words of the greatly underrated New York psychiatrist Paul Rosenfels, "to serve an idealized object," and the masculine man's to discover "the true nature of opportunity" through exercise of such virtues as "personal courage, self-confidence, and spontaneous initiative." These needs lead to the creation of psychic imbalances which mated union can help to resolve. Rosenfels describes this vividly, substituting the phrase "creative love" for the feminine man and "creative power" for the masculine:

      Creative love is oriented toward giving and its primary tool is insight. Creative power is equally organized for giving and its primary tool is the constructive mastery which is keyed to the nature of the materials it manipulates. Love and power use the mated mechanism, each finding its potential through the other in the same psychological way that male and female mate in nature. When a psychologically yielding male is interacting with masculinity, he is exposed to an intensity of feeling which can readily enter a sexual channel. A psychologically assertive male equally finds himself exposed to a tendency to possess the feminine resources so richly developed in the yielding male personality. (Homosexuality: The Psychology of the Creative Process, page 46)

-- reprinted from The Living Room Mysteries:
Patterns of Male Intimacy Book 2, p. 82,
Studies in Jungian psychology by Jungian analysts no. 60,
Inner City Books, 1993