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     Because cultural trends typically develop simultaneously within popular and intellectual spheres, it is unsurprising that my father’s exploration of the archetypal eros-identified masculine coincided with the rise of what is called the “mythopoetic men’s movement.” This movement—well elucidated by Dennis Pottenger in his essay “Why Men Went Into the Woods: Jungian Psychology and the Archetype of the Wild Man” —developed from American poet Robert Bly’s publication of the book Iron Hans: A Book About Men (1990), an analysis of one of the Grimm’s Brothers’ folk legends about a young prince’s discovery of a voracious and terrifying wild man in the forest and the powers he receives from him. Though some fun has been made in later years of a now-clichéd picture of men congregating in the woods to dance and beat tom-toms in their underpants, the mythopoetic men’s movement remains an important reentry into the self-exploration and reintegration of individual men with the natural, instinctive, and feeling, that is—the eros—dimensions of the personal and archetypal male psyche, which has for so long been pushed into the shadows.

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—Catherine Nevil Parker