The link was not related to this thread, i put it there because had been thinking about something I read about men+

"When I first read this story of Fasts, in 1961, I was excited because it seemed to me that he and I were approaching the same subject from different angles. I contacted Fast to ask him whether he believed that an experiment like the one he described was a real possibility. He replied that indeed he did. He had implied as much in the story: They (men-plus) are not of recent arrival; they have been cropping up for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. If such beings evolved by chance, they would feel oddly ill-at-ease in the world, without fully understanding why. They might even begin to feel that their kind of intelligence and insight were a disadvantage to their survival - perhaps even that it was a kind of illness.(Wagner once went to take the waters in a German spa town, hoping to be cured of his love of music which he felt was destroying his happiness.) In short, they would feel themselves to be Outsiders. "

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jbmorgan/postscripts.htm

Eugenics does not advocate, well not my version anyway, suicide, it advocates selective breeding, in a moral sense, to reduce suffering.

People kill themselves for lots of reasons, not only genetic, it is far more likely a sign of a sick society than a sick individual.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

 From its inception eugenics was supported by prominent people, including H.G. Wells, Emile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, William Keith Kellogg and Margaret Sanger.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Eugenics_and_the_United_States.2C_1890s.E2.80.931945

During the 20th century, researchers became interested in the idea that mental illness could run in families and conducted a number of studies to document the heritability of such illnesses as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. Their findings were used by the eugenics movement as proof for its cause. State laws were written in the late 1800s and early 1900s to prohibit marriage and force sterilization of the mentally ill in order to prevent the "passing on" of mental illness to the next generation. These laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 and were not abolished until the mid-20th century. By 1945 over 45,000 mentally ill individuals in the United States had been forcibly sterilized.[citation needed] All in all, 60,000 Americans suffered from sterilization.[33]


"The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case that the state of Virginia could sterilize those it thought unfit. The most significant era of eugenic sterilization was between 1907 and 1963, when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States.[37] "



BUT

mental illness  can produce genius, so, i suppose darwin was right, and YOU, natural selection is indeed the answer !

I completely agree

=

In today's news:

The suicide rate among young men in England and Wales is at the lowest level for 30 years, say researchers.

No it doesn't, that's true - it generally draws the conclusion that rates are dropping thanks to factors that actually made it harder to commit suicide - like catalytic convertors in cars cutting out CO emissions, eg.

Hi Increpatio-I'm sorry if my prose was a bit convoluted. By 'flattened-out rites of passage' I meant that for economic and educational deprivation young guys can't leave home in a structured way and/ or see a
structured medium-term future for themselves. Parenting is time-stressed or occurs much younger, so that psychological issues become flattened out and between virtual peers rather than the oedipal revolt
and individualisation that was implicit, if not explicit in society previously. Bly correaltes this flattening out to the extroversion and truncation of an internal life, whence extreme behaviours, no boundaries and  no sense of benign 'holding' by social mores. What replaces them is the (neighbour)'hood which has no concept of neighbourliness, nurture, mentoring etc. What could replace them long-term is a version of therapy that transcends its traditional trappings-a sense of personal narrative. Jungians and another lot called Psychosynthesists (latter coming into mentoring more and more) do this through archetypes and folklore, which is a not-too-lost resource in ethnic minority cultures for example.

I'm flattered that you wonder if I have anything published in this direction-I find completing Government target paperwork takes up that time, for now...

Yes, I do see the 'flattening out' on a daily basis.

The Lacan reference is interesting-my ballpark is Ronnie Laing (the essence of rather than the histrionics). I stumbled a bit with Lacan when he suggested (as I recall)that language was irreducibly 'male' as a construct-confusing I think popular cultural ritualistic convention, boyish loops in soundbites etc, with the deep individuated structuring of language.

The story with which Bly is iconically associated  is 'Iron John' by the Brothers Grimm, which his book of that name meditatively takes apart, analytically. Another useful Bly phrase is a 'verbal bath', an invocation of pure`language which he feels Russian culture has traditionally valued in asking kids how they feel about things, and equally between adults. He does some great riffs on Khali and Babi Yar`with Marion Woodman in 'The Maiden King' which seeks to disentangle and re-entangle maleness and femaleness. Frequently Bly leads off on a tour of paralell archetypes in a range of cultures, and Rumi crops up quite a bit. What`I think is vital about Bly is that he has seized the bull of cultural decline by the horns as a poet, and in so doing points out ways to re-activate (in my case) clients from within. It's also helped me figure things out as a hack and compositionally.
I don't use these stories verbatim, but I encourage clients to view their own stories through a variety of filters en passant with a Bly feel lurking ever more frequently.

Thanks for your interest!