Gods in Everyman

Archetypes That Shape Men's Lives

By: Jean Shinoda Bolen MD

Narrated by: Joana Garcia

The companion volume to Goddesses in Everywoman reveals the powerful inner patterns, or archetypes, that shape men's personalities, careers, and personal relationships—offering insights into Greek mythology, Jungian archetypal psychology, and into themselves and the people in their lives.

A Jungian analyst, Dr. Bolen introduces our inner patterns in the guise of eight archetypal gods. From the authoritarian, power-seeking gods (Zeus, Poseidon) to the gods of creativity (Apollo, Hephaestus) to the sensual Dionysus, Dr. Bolen shows men how to identify their ruling gods, how to decide which to cultivate and which to overcome, and how to tap the power of these enduring archetypes in order to enrich and strengthen their lives. She stresses the importance of understanding which gods you are attracted to and which are incompatible with your expectations, uncovers the origins of the often-difficult father-son relationship, and explores society's deep conflict between nurturing behavior and the need to foster masculinity.

In Gods in Everyman, Dr. Bolen presents us with a compassionate and lucid male psychology that will help all men and women to better understand themselves and their relationships with their fathers, their sons, their brothers, and their lovers.

©1989, 2014 Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD (P)2022 Tantor

Great read, well written.

I found the book to be an engaging look at the male archetypes and how they are manifested in our lives, and how we can avoid becoming possessed by a single archetype.

The narrator has a nice voice, but her bizarre and inconsistent pronunciation of relatively simple words was distracting to me.

As Good as Goddesses in Everywoman... but

It's popular Jungian psychology of the same order of her Goddesses in Everywoman. I don't necessarily buy everything in every book, but the archetypes are interesting, they have useful applications to both soul work and to writing so it was worth the listen. Everything was going swimmingly until the last three chapters when I got slapped with a rather strong dose of latent antisemitism and homophobia. Hear what I am saying: I don't think Bolen is either consciously antisemitic, or homophobic. She is writing out unconscious biases. The text in these sections seems largely unaltered from the mid-1990s, so there is a strong probability she didn't review it for this edition. Based on other wrtings she was raised in a traditional Lutheran or Catholic background and she picked up some of the attitudes about the Hebrew Scriptures that are inherent in very traditional churches in those Christian strands. She writes unthinkingly from that perspective--as a much more liberal Christian, taught not to see the dichotomy between the two Scriptures but continuity, the repeated "Savage Old Testament God" v. "Benign New Testament God" is not just theologically wrong, it comes from a place that led to the Shoah (no exaggeration). She has left the tradition, but tradition has not left her. Then she writes that "Apollo has no significant relationships." I was driving when this came on, and had to remind myself that she was using Hamilton and several other PG sources for her myths. Apollo most certainly had significant relationships. They are just all with men. Her sources just don't mention them because Hycanithus, Narcissus and several other young men do not fit the view of "Zeus' favored son." You can't mention what your sources don't. Sources from the 1950s written for children or from heavily censored Greek American popular presses that omit a lot of the queerness of classical Greece, won't have them. Up until I got slapped with those two smelly socks it was a pretty good listen. -1 star for not enough work to overcome biases