How to Survive Your Parents

the wretched product of an unmanly (or absent) father and an uncorrected mother. This kind of man uses female ways to retrieve the command of his lost man­hood. What typically emerges, of course, is a more sub­missive woman in a man's body. How can he become a real man using sly, seductive methods: surrendering in order to take charge? Will he not either strengthen his wife's role of powerful tyrant, or at best become that power-become a tyrant himself?
     In the realm of the ego, being "right" is equal in value to being powerful. So even though Mr. Nice's violent wife may remain as she is, a mean, masculine, animal power in the home, Mr. Nice can see himself as hard done by; he is "Mr. Right," by comparison with her, and is thus her equal or superior. We see here the reverse of a common male-female relationship: The woman's efforts to seduce the man out of his (beastly) power succeed only in feed­ing his violence; but she has her consolation in seeing herself as the martyred "Mrs. Right."
     When the authority of grace is lost, a lower, compensa­tory form of authority can appear-the authority of a jun­gle hell. Here again we see the classic symptom of sub­mission at work, its desperate effort to subdue the vio­lence that originally it caused. The cowering, frightened (guileful) female, finding she cannot make the beast she has aroused serve her cause, makes use of its evolving wickedness by comparing it with her goodness. You know the type. She is like a weak president who sees himself as a peace-maker, who in fact is only appeasing and supporting evil, thus encouraging greater evil to appear-as war.
     The smug hypocrisy of this type of woman promotes

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