Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity (Perigee)

How does a boy learn to be a man?

A man learns masculinity primarily from his father. But generations of boys who grow up without caring fathers or male mentors to emulate are left to guess what "men" are really like. They rely on cultural icons--larger-than-life images--as models of masculinity. As a result, they grow up mirroring overblown myths of manhood. Obsessed with being "man enough," they become philanderers, controllers, and competitors--constantly overcompensating for their loss of a true role model, yet sorely unprepared for family life.

In Man Enough, psychiatrist and family therapist Frank Pittman explores what it is like to grow up male today. With great poignancy, humor, and candor, he weaves together case studies from his practice, examples from literature and films, plus personal vignettes from his own experiences as a father to examine these hyper-masculine men and to illustrate how they developed and how they can change. Dr. Pittman asserts that men can move past proving their masculinity and start practicing it by striving with the other guys rather than against them, achieving equality and intimacy with their mates--and by fathering. A man raises himself as he raises children and learns to understand and forgive his parents as he becomes one.

An important book for men and women, Man Enough offers a new approach to issues of commitment, caring and control and creates a positive model for the fathers of tomorrow's men.

Frank Pittman, M.D., is a psychiatrist and family therapist in Atlanta, Georgia. His revolutionary research on family therapy as an alternative to psychiatric hospitalization, conducted with Langsley and Kaplan in Denver in the mid-1960s, won awards from both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Family Therapy Association. In the late 1970s, Pittman championed community mental health as he directed the public psychiatric at Atlanta's Grady Hospital

For the last twenty years, Pittman has been in private practice, teaching in the department of psychiatry at Emory University and in the department of psychology at Georgia State University, and doing workshops around the world.

Since 1983, he has written a regular movie review for the Family Therapy Networker. Since 1991, he has written a monthly advice column for men in New Woman magazine.

He works and lives in Atlanta with Betsy, his wife of 33 years, and a steadily changing menage of their grown children, nieces and nephews.