Poseidon (Bolen)

Definition

Bolen’s Poseidon is a pattern in men’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek god of the sea. In Gods in Everyman (1989) it is the second of three father gods, between Zeus and Hades, and her chapter title gives its domain as the realm of emotion and instinct. Where her Zeus acts from will and the long view, the man in whom Poseidon predominates acts from feeling: his responses are immediate, strong and physical, his loyalties fierce, and his injuries remembered. Bolen gives the pattern a positive side, emotional depth and an instinctive, earthy masculinity close to the body and to nature, and a troubled one, which her section headings name as too much fluidity and emotional instability, together with a grudge-holding temper that can make a father vengeful. Her central claim is cultural: this is the part of men’s psyches that patriarchal cultures devalue and repress, so that in many men it survives only underground.

Two exclusions apply. This is not Poseidon the god of Greek religion, whose myths enter only as Bolen’s material. And it is not one of the classical figures of Jung’s psychology. Bolen calls her gods archetypes; what she describes is a type of man, recorded here as hers: one of eight god patterns for men (1989), companions to the seven goddesses of Goddesses in Everywoman (1984), among them Demeter, Poseidon’s sister.

History

The pattern first appears in chapter 4 of Gods in Everyman (Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1989; paperback 1990), the middle chapter of part II, “The Father Archetype: Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades”. Bolen heads the chapter with lines from the Homeric hymn to Poseidon in Charles Boer’s translation and follows the book’s standing order: the god, the archetype, the man, his difficulties and ways to grow. A twenty-fifth-anniversary edition (2014) changed the book’s subtitle; the figure has not been renamed.

The myths she draws on are public domain. In the Iliad Poseidon reminds Zeus that the three brothers drew lots for their shares and that he is of equal honour, and then gives way (15.185–217). Bolen’s heading on Poseidon’s hostility to the Trojans rests on the grievance he recalls in book 21, when he and Apollo laboured a year for the king of Troy:

When, however, the glad hours brought round the time of payment, mighty Laomedon robbed us of all our hire and sent us off with nothing but abuse. — Homer, Iliad (c. 750 BCE), 21.441–457, trans. S. Butler (1898)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The Odyssey adds the god’s anger at the blinding of his son Polyphemus, which keeps Odysseus from home (1.68–75), and the short Homeric hymn (22) praises him as earth-shaker, tamer of horses and saviour of ships.

Two modern sources shape the chapter. From Arthur and Libby Colman’s Earth Father/Sky Father (1981), listed among her sources for it, Bolen takes the contrast between the remote sky father and the father present in the body and the household; Shepherd Bliss (1989) read her Poseidon as just such an earth father, an alternative to the dominant sky father. And in a section on Poseidon as the archetype of the Wild Man she turns to Robert Bly, “a major American poet and leader of the men’s movement”, and his retelling of the Grimm tale of Iron John, the hairy man at the bottom of a pond. Bliss reports her reading of the tale as an image of a rejected and devalued Poseidon, a repressed archetype of the unconscious. Bly’s book-length treatment, Iron John, followed in 1990. Bolen’s Poseidon therefore predates the movement’s best-known text and draws on Bly’s earlier retelling.

The debate

The roster places Bolen’s Poseidon nearest the shadow, and Bolen herself uses the word: Poseidon and Hades, she writes, are “shadow aspects of Zeus”, the parts of the father archetype that men in power suppress or ignore. That is not Jung’s shadow in its usual sense. Jung’s shadow is the part of one’s own personality the ego rejects and meets in other people; it differs in content from person to person. Bolen’s is a collective and cultural claim, that patriarchy prizes the sky father’s mind and will and pushes feeling and instinct out of sight, attached to one god. Her account is closer to the men’s movement’s Wild Man, the instinctive masculinity that Bly said modern men had lost, than to anything in the Collected Works.

That alignment is what critics of the movement questioned. David Tacey (1997), a Jungian scholar writing on men, objected to the romantic idea that archetypes are fixed in an eternal dream space: Bolen, he notes, asserts at the start of Goddesses in Everywoman that archetypes exist outside time, whereas archetypal figures are heavily conditioned by culture and cannot be carried unchanged across societies (p. 20). Andrew Samuels (1993) put the same division in political terms, setting the movement’s essentialists, or archetypalists, against those who treat masculinity as social and cultural. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1992), writing from inside the movement, objected instead that Bolen identifies gods with personality types when “no human being is an archetype, and neither is any God or Goddess” (notes to chapter 2, n. 17). Bliss, for his part, found the Poseidon chapter the most compelling of the three fathers.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Bolen’s Poseidon as a psychological construct, and no instrument based on her eight gods has published psychometrics. The mainstream literature on emotional expression and its suppression in men, on alexithymia and on gender norms, makes no use of the figure.

Appearances

Bolen’s mythic instances are the grudge against Troy, the persecution of Odysseus and the god’s relationships, including the myth of Poseidon and Pelops, which she mentions in connection with homosexual men in whom the pattern is strong. Her men’s-movement instance is Iron John. Later popular discussion of her types has attached the label to public figures known for intense emotion, as in a 2018 episode of the Personality Hacker podcast on the father gods. Except for Bolen’s own instances, these are readings, and the guide’s own exemplars are marked as such.

Sources

• Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250098-4. Chapters 3–4; part, chapter and section titles checked by full-text search of the Internet Archive scan, https://archive.org/details/godsineverymanne0000bole
• Bolen, J. S. (2014). Gods in Everyman: Archetypes That Shape Men’s Lives (twenty-fifth-anniversary ed.). Harper Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-06-232994-3.
• Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3.
• Homer, Iliad 15.185–217, 21.441–457 (S. Butler, Trans., 1898). Project Gutenberg #2199.
• Homer, Odyssey 1.68–75 (S. Butler, Trans., 1900). Project Gutenberg #1727.
• Homeric Hymn 22, to Poseidon. In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
• Colman, A., & Colman, L. (1981). Earth Father/Sky Father: The Changing Concept of Fathering. Prentice-Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-223024-7.
• Bliss, S. (1989). [Review of Gods in Everyman]. Yoga Journal, May/June 1989, pp. 72–76. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_vOsDAAAAMBAJ
• Bly, R. (1990). Iron John: A Book About Men. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-201-51720-0.
• Tacey, D. (1997). Remaking Men: Jung, Spirituality and Social Change. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-14241-0. Chapter 1, “Archetypes, gods, men and women”, p. 20.
• Samuels, A. (1993). The Political Psyche. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-08102-3. Chapter 8, “Reflecting on men”.
• Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5. Notes to chapter 2, n. 17 (pp. 245–246 by the index).
• Personality Hacker (2018). Podcast episode 0236, “Gods in Everyman: The Father God Archetypes”. https://personalityhacker.com/podcast-episode-0236-gods-in-everyman-the-father-god-archetypes/