Frightened men: a wish for intimacy and a fear of closeness

Men who failed to achieve an adequate separation from their mothers are particularly prone to experience serious distress with their marriages during their middle years, when the wish for intimacy, coupled with a fear of closeness never resolved during infancy, is retriggered. An onslaught of biological, social, and psychological stresses force acknowledgement of previously denied needs for succor, plunging them into battle with their wife-surrogate mother. The resulting counterphobic, hypersexual, ofter self-destructive behaviors are usually falsely interpreted as oedipal. Clinical material in this report strongly suggests this distress is not primarily related to genital sexual issues or fears of castration, but more often concerns issues of autonomy and independence which typically involve the mother and which arose in the toddler or anal phase. Supportive evidence for this thesis from cross-cultural observations, child developmental studies, and primatology is presented, and the usefulness of this view in facilitating clinical work with such men is described.