The male psyche is like a Bollywood script that went through too many rewrites. One draft says stoic hero, the next says tortured villain, another insists comic sidekick—and somehow all three end up on screen, sharing the same face. It’s not disorder; it’s the casting call of masculinity.

The Theory and the Drama

Freud spoke of the id, ego, and superego—three flatmates in the same brain who never stop arguing. Jung gave us the persona and the shadow, the mask and what it hides. Lacan, forever the avant-garde Frenchman, declared the self is always split, chasing wholeness like Don Quixote tilting at Wi-Fi towers.

But you don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to see it. Literature and cinema have been staging this inner conflict for centuries.

Hamlet is the original overthinker—prince, philosopher, and procrastinator—unable to reconcile duty with doubt.

Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment murders with icy rationality, only to be undone by guilt and compassion.

Fight Club’s Tyler Durden is the consumerist male shadow punching his way out of IKEA catalogs.

Arthur Fleck in Joker becomes the perfect allegory of social neglect splitting a man into clown and criminal.

Even Arjun Reddy, in all his cinematic rage, is a case study in love and self-destruction wrestling inside one psyche.

The Cultural Contradiction

The script is written early. Men are told:

Be strong, but don’t cry.

Provide, but don’t complain.

Protect, but if necessary, destroy.

No human mind can hold those contradictions without creating inner factions. One part dons the shining armor, the other festers in the shadows. Patriarchy, in effect, manufactures divided psyches.

The Evidence Off-Screen

This isn’t just metaphor. WHO data (2019) shows men die by suicide at nearly double the rate of women, worldwide and in India. Substance abuse is disproportionately male, a way to numb the split. Violence, too, is often the psyche erupting outward when dialogue inside collapses. Trauma research (Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk) reminds us that fragmentation isn’t madness—it’s a survival strategy.

My Inner Koan

When I experience this split, it doesn’t feel like illness. It feels like a courtroom. One voice is rational, measured, socially acceptable. The other is raw, emotional, sometimes rebellious. Both are me. Neither is insane. The disturbance is not dysfunction—it is dialogue.

A koan, then:
If a man is told to be stoic and tender at the same time, is he disturbed or just multilingual in suffering?

Curtain Call

The disturbed and split male psyche isn’t an anomaly—it’s the default inheritance. Therapy’s role isn’t to stitch it into a single seamless cloth, but to teach a man how to wear his patchwork without tearing himself apart.

India is a hard nation to get by, with your Indian identity. And perhaps harder still, with your Indian masculinity.
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