Abstract
This article draws from the life and work of George Bellows (1882–1925), a noted American painter at the turn of the twentieth century, in relation to his art instructor, Robert Henri (1865–1929), to envision pastoral relationships that foster spontaneous self-expression and the embrace of intrapsychic complexity in contemporary American boys and young men. It examines cultural trends and male psychosexual struggles that bolster undue self-screening at the expense of archaic, semiconscious desires to see and to be seen, to know and to be known. By identifying with artwork, artist, and art instructor, ministers or mentors aspire to evoke and enrich several facets of their own and their protégé’s self-experience, designated here the unedited self, the unmanifested self, and the unencumbered self.
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Notes
The painting is in the public domain and may also be viewed at https://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/art-object-page.134485.html.
Bellows’s 1912Portrait of Professor Joseph Russell Taylor may be accessed at https://www.georgewesleybellows.org/Portrait-Of-Professor-Joseph-Russell-Taylor.html.
A similar lithograph, entitled Business-Men’s Bath, 1923, may be accessed at
Bellows most likely drew the undated Sweeney, one of his only known baseball pictures, around the same time, in his mid-20s, that he painted Forty-Two Kids. The semi-pro team’s owner (seated and wearing a derby hat) is readying to pay players their ten dollars after the game. Bellows’s initials are inscribed on the suitcase in the lower left corner (see Thomas 2018).
In their groundbreaking A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us about Sexual Relationships, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam (2011) forego typical self-report surveys used by social scientists in studying human sexual desire to instead examine vast data available from tracking online searches of tens of millions of Internet users worldwide. Among the findings most surprising to Ogas and Gaddam was the frequency of online searches by heterosexual men—but only rarely by women—for images of penises, which ranked seventh overall among sexual search categories (p. 252). Males of all sexual stripes want to see other men’s packages and, as the research also makes clear, to display their own. “On Reddit’s heterosexual Gone Wild forum, where users are free to post NC-17 pictures of themselves,” Ogas (2011) notes, “35% of images self-posted by men consist of penises. Men’s desire to show their penis is only matched by men’s equally natural urge to look at other men’s penises.” In an interview after the release of A Billion Wicked Thoughts, Ogas (2013) remarked, “We know from the numbers there’s an overwhelming interest among heterosexual men to look at penises—the numbers are just enormous. Yet every time I talk about this, I’ve yet to have a guy come up to me and agree to it.” A boy or man is forbidden from acknowledging this pervasive, possibly universal, “natural urge,” certainly to others but even consciously to himself.
Adam Phillips (1993), summarizing an area of therapeutic expertise of psychoanalyst Masud Khan (1929–1984), a protégé of Anna Freud and close colleague of D. W. Winnicott, describes perversion as a strategy for maintaining excessive control: “We are being perverse whenever we think we know beforehand exactly what we desire. To know beforehand is to assume that otherness, whether it be a person, a medium, an environment, is redundant; that it has nothing to offer us, that it brings nothing—or just rage and disappointment—to the occasion” (p. 63). Perversion, in Khan’s understanding, manifests not in a desire to see or to be seen but rather in a refusal, of sorts, to see—more specifically, in a refusal to see otherness in oneself or another, a refusal to be surprised by the other in intimacy. It is a preempting of grace (see also Khan 1989, pp. 20–27).
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Dykstra, R.C. The Unedited Self: Fostering Subversive Imagination in Ministry with Boys and Young Men. Pastoral Psychol 69, 563–592 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-020-00929-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-020-00929-y