No doubt the projection involved in infatuation and idealization of someone is a powerful experience to have.
Yes, years after President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and years after Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, I was seriously disillusioned to learn about each of my two respective hero's sexual promiscuity.
Incidentally, I have written about President Kennedy's sexual promiscuity in my recent OEN article "John F. Kennedy Was a Compulsive Womanizer" (dated November 29, 2024).
And I have written about Dr. King in my OEN article "Jonathan Eig on the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." (dated May 28, 2023).
When I was in high school, I was inspired by President Kennedy's inaugural address in 1961. I wrote my first op-ed commentary about his inspiring words in my high-school student newspaper. As a young man, I frequently thought that I was asking what I could do for my country when I protested against the Vietnam War - when I was receiving a draft deferment to continue my formal education at Saint Louis University.
I heard the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speak on the campus of Saint Louis University on October 12, 1964, and I heard him speak in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 25, 1965, at the conclusion of the march from Selma, Alabama, that he led and that I joined with some other students from St. Louis.
Subsequently, Dr. King's inspiring speeches led me to devote ten years of my life (1969-1979) to teaching about a thousand black inner-city youth in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, and in New York City (in 1975-1976) in the context of open admissions. I also taught about a thousand white youth in the context of open admissions between 1969 and 1979.
I wrote about the context of open admission in higher education in my 1973 doctoral dissertation in the field of higher education at Saint Louis University, titled Opening the Door. In it, I wrote a ninety-page review of literature about open admissions in higher education (pp. 30-119). That ninety-page review of literature about open admissions helped fortify me enough that I published the article "Open Admissions, Orality, and Literacy" in the psychiatric Journal of Youth and Adolescence (1974). As the title suggests, I draw on Ong's work in it. When I sent Father Ong a copy of my essay at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Science in Stanford, California, he helped get my essay published in the psychiatric Journal of Youth and Adolescence. My article helped inspire Mina Shaughnessy to arrange to have me invited to teach English in the context of open admissions at the City College of the City University of New York in 1975-1976.
Now, even though we undoubtedly find it uplifting and, in a sense, consoling to be infatuated with our idealization of a certain significant person in our lives, we nevertheless face the challenge of learning how to access the optimal and positive forms of the four masculine archetypes of maturity in our psyches -- and the optimal and positive forms of the four feminine archetypes of maturity in our psyches.
Now, there is no foolproof way for men and women today to learn how to access the optimal and positive forms of the eight archetypes of maturity in their psyches. Clearly, Robert Moore believed that he could assist men in learning how to access the optimal and positive forms of the four masculine archetypes in their psyches by writing, with Douglas Gillette as his co-author, a detailed book about each of the four masculine archetypes in the male psyche in the early 1990s:
(1) The King Within: Accessing the King [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (1992a);
(2) The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (1992b);
(3) The Magician Within: Accessing the Shaman Archetype] in the Male Psyche (1993a);
(4) The Lover: Accessing the Lover [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (1993b).
As we know, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette's five books in the early 1990s about the four masculine archetypes of maturity in the male psyche did not result in a mass movement of American men who had learned to access the optimal and positive forms of the four masculine archetypes of maturity in their psyches.
Incidentally, in 2007, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette published the revised and expanded second edition of The King With: Accessing the King [Archetype] in the Male Psyche.
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