Abstract
Counseling and psychotherapy with young males has always posed special challenges to the clinician. Given recent important changes in social conceptions of manhood and masculinity and questions about best practices in mental health care, the existential approach to working with males in their late teens and early adult years provides an alternative modality that responds to both areas of change. The guiding principle of Existential Therapy (ET) is that no matter what the presenting symptoms, the underlying reason for seeking therapy is to confront the ultimate concerns of existence. This is relevant to work with young males for whom such concerns are coming into prominence, often for the first time, with great impact.
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The strong influence of the psychoanalytic tradition on ET in my case will not be lost on most readers. On the other hand, I have found a wide variety of basic sources from multiple perspectives that dovetail nicely with my version of ET. Mark Kiselica et al. (2011) has been assembling a series of anthologies of papers on counseling males of all ages that take a “person-centered” conventional approach.
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See the legendary debate between Albert Ellis and Thomas Szasz (Ellis and Szasz 1977) in which Szasz vividly explains the difference between disease and illness.
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The literature on development is extensive and familiarity with it is by the reader is presupposed. A partial bibliography would include Arnold Gesell, Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, and Lawrence Kohlberg. Much of this literature has been challenged for being ethnocentrist but it bears reading if only to learn how to carry out qualitative research.
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Zoja’s book is, in fact, entitled Hector’s Gesture, which refers the ritual assumption of responsibility of fatherhood by a male for the male infant presented to him by its mother, whether or not the boy is his own. Only recently has genetic testing made it possible to be certain about this. Before that and even now, in principle, this is what every father does with his sons (and daughters) on becoming the father and not just the progenitor of his offspring.
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None of what is asserted here implies that such features grounded in male anatomy and physiology should not be introduced and encouraged in the upbringing of girls. Female masculinity may well be encouraged. So may malefemininity. Both, however, will contend with the facts of anatomy and millions of years of evolution.
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Groth, M. (2019). Working with Adolescent Males: Special Considerations from an Existential Perspective. In: Barry, J.A., Kingerlee, R., Seager, M., Sullivan, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Male Psychology and Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04384-1_17
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