Have any of you read Iron John by Robert Bly?

2018-02-14T17:28:31+00:00

I have and I thought it was quite eye opening. The story itself is not the main point. The explanations by Bly about the 3 knights and the times of struggle and knowledge and sage wisdom are what counts. It was also good for exploring family dynamics and led me down a road of self discovery on why I was such a simp and a nice guy.

AlanCrowe · 2018-02-14T18:47:50+00:00

I was impressed by Robert Bly's erudition. He knew obscure foreign myths. Sometimes he made his own translations into English. But the book left me cold; I didn't feel that I got his point.

Later I realised that I had come to the book with some very strong beliefs about the kind of biography that qualifies a man to write that kind of book. If I list various potential qualifying biographies, you will get a sense of my underlying belief.

Perhaps he is an army officer and has ended up in charge of training recruits. His experiences looking into the background of young soldiers who go absent without leave were the inspiration for his book.

Perhaps he is a psychologist. He worked in family therapy and zeroed in on working with young men.

Perhaps he studied criminology, was a police officer for a while, before getting involved in youth justice and ending up as governor of a Borstal

Perhaps he worked in the engineering industry and supervised the apprenticeship system. He developed a deep interest in who completed their apprenticeship and who dropped out.

I was impressed by his erudition because I imagined that myths and foreign languages were his hobby. I imagined that his depth and skill testified to a powerful intellect and broad curiosity. He had seen a variety of different approaches to the troubles of young men and had founded the mytho-poetic mens movement as a response. I expected his book to reveal why he preferred the mytho-poetic approach to other approaches. I was disappointed; the book was myth and poetry all the way.

Later I thought to investigate his biography. He is a poet and linguist. Well, that's awkward. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. He wasn't choosing the mytho-poetic approach as better than the alternatives that he had been professionally involved with. He was taking a mytho-poetic approach because that was all he knew. That was why the book had such a tight focus. That is why I couldn't see how myth and poetry related to the wider world.

The book was first published in 1990 and has been left behind my the rapid pace of social change. Consider this from the chapter The Pillow and the Key, starting the section The Remote Father

The German psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich writes about this father-son crisis in his book called Society Without the Father. The gist of his idea is that if the son does not actually see what his father does during the day and through all the seasons of the year, a hole will appear in the son's psyche, and the hole will fill with demons who tell him that the father's work is evil and that the father is evil.

The title Society Without the Father sounds promisingly up to date, but reading the entire paragraph we see that without is referring to the father being out at work during the day. It is not about the destruction of the nuclear family and children being brought up by single mothers.

2018-02-14T19:50:25+00:00

No but I've read Robert bly by Iron John, and I have to say, it was a breath of fresh air

Title	Have any of you read Iron John by Robert Bly?
Author	ZubKhanate
Upvotes	3
Comments	4
Date	February 14, 2018 5:08 PM UTC (8 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MGTOW
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MGTOW/comments/7xjilw/have_any_of_you_read_iron_john_by_robert_bly/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MGTOW/have-any-of-you-read-iron-john-by-robert-bly.593679 https://theredarchive.com/post/593679

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