William James’s concept of the sick soul, first articulated in his 1902 Gifford Lectures published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, remains one of the most durable frameworks in the psychology of religion for understanding a particular kind of anguish. Unlike melancholy that merely dims experience, the sick soul describes a condition in which the world itself loses its grip on a person, in which goods that once seemed self-evidently worthwhile appear hollow, and in which the very act of existing can feel like a wrong to be righted. James catalogued such experiences across centuries of religious autobiography, arguing that they represent not simply pathology but a distinctive way of encountering reality, one that sees through the cheerful surface of things to a deeper unease. For James, this vision, however painful, carried epistemic weight: the sick soul perceives something real about the fragility of meaning that healthier temperaments may systematically miss.

The counterpoint to the sick soul in James’s typology is the twice-born character, the person who passes through rupture and emerges into a restored relationship with the world. Crucially, James insisted that this restoration is not achieved by an act of will alone. The healthy-minded person, who never falls into crisis, simply affirms the world’s goodness; the twice-born person, by contrast, must receive a new relation to the world from beyond the boundaries of the self. James described this as a process in which the divided self surrenders, and in surrendering finds that the world, or God, meets it with new significance. It is this receptive structure of transformation that Clements and Teeter place at the center of their account of masculine crisis, arguing that the remedy for a broken relation to the world cannot be manufactured by further assertion of the self that is already in distress.

The claim that boys and men tend to relate to the world through projection rather than reception has a substantial research lineage behind it. Work on conformity to masculine norms has repeatedly linked restrictive masculine socialization to poorer mental health outcomes, including a 2017 meta-analysis in the Journal of Counseling Psychology that found associations between conformity to traditional masculine norms and negative psychological indicators. Addis and Mahalik’s influential 2003 analysis in American Psychologist framed men’s reluctance to seek help as a product of social contexts that reward self-reliance and penalize disclosure. The American Psychological Association’s 2018 guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men, the first of their kind, codified these concerns into professional standards, citing evidence that men die by suicide at elevated rates, underuse mental health services, and often externalize distress through anger, substance use, or withdrawal rather than voicing it directly.

Against this backdrop, the receptive self that the authors describe offers a reframing of what therapeutic and pastoral work with men might aim at. If a man’s crisis stems from a self that has been projected outward and found wanting, then interventions that simply urge him to project harder, to assert confidence, to fix himself through effort, may deepen the original rupture. The authors’ argument suggests instead that what is needed is a posture in which the man becomes available to being addressed, by other people, by the natural world, by religious reality, or by his own unarticulated inner life. This is why listening, rather than speaking or asserting, becomes the central metaphor of the paper. A listener does not impose meaning; a listener makes room for meaning to arrive from elsewhere.

The methodological instrument supporting this claim is the listening guide, a qualitative research technique developed by Carol Gilligan and her collaborators over several decades. The method asks researchers to attend to a participant’s narrative in multiple sequential passes, each time listening for a different register: the plot of the story, the voice of the first-person I, and the relationships in which that voice is embedded. Gilligan and Jessica Eddy, writing in Qualitative Psychology in 2021, described the method as both new and timeless, and characterized it as opening oneself, one’s inner world, to the voices and experiences of others. A 2025 study in Psychology of Men and Masculinities by Shames-Dawson, Ozoguz, and Rubin argued explicitly for the utility of the listening guide in the psychology of men and masculinities, a field that has historically struggled to get men talking about interior experience at all.

The listening guide’s emphasis on drawing out the I voice of participants connects to a broader body of research on boys’ relational capacities. Niobe Way’s longitudinal work with adolescent boys, reported in her 2011 book Deep Secrets, documented that boys in early and mid-adolescence often speak with striking emotional openness about their closest friendships, and that this openness appears to erode as they absorb cultural mandates about masculine stoicism. Way’s findings suggest that the capacity for receptive, intimate listening is not absent in boys but suppressed, which lends empirical plausibility to the claim that receptivity is more basic to masculine being than projection. If boys begin with a rich relational receptivity that is trained out of them, then recovery of that receptivity in adulthood is a matter of unlearning rather than acquisition.

The paper’s philosophical architecture also draws on a tradition of thought about how selves and worlds relate. James himself held that the relationship between self and world is pluralistic but not relativistic. Many persons receive many different significances from the world, and each person may feel that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns, yet this plurality does not collapse into the claim that all interpretations are equally true. A shared public world exists, one whose meanings can be agreed upon, disputed, and clarified through public interrogation. Science contributes a set of facts to this interrogation, James argued, but it does not supply the personal point of view from which facts become significant. Two people may perceive the same animal, one as food and the other as a conscious being, and the reception of either significance does not render the alternative false.

This pluralistic realism has practical consequences for pastoral care. It means that a caregiver need not choose between respecting a man’s idiosyncratic way of finding meaning and affirming that some meanings are more adequate than others. The world genuinely affords different roles and purposes to different people, but the affording is not arbitrary, and it can fail. When the world stops affording, when a man can no longer receive purpose from his work, his relationships, or his faith, the resulting condition resembles what James called the sick soul. The authors’ contention is that this failure of reception, rather than any deficit of assertive energy, is often the underlying structure of masculine spiritual distress.

The broader cultural diagnosis embedded in the paper resonates with sociological accounts of contemporary masculinity. Michael Kimmel’s Guyland mapped the prolonged adolescence of young men suspended between dependence and adulthood, while writers such as William Pollack described the boy code that teaches emotional silence from an early age. Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration adds another layer, suggesting that the pace of modern life itself undermines the slow, receptive attention that listening requires. Simone Weil, whom the authors cite, wrote that attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer, a formulation that captures the paper’s implicit claim that listening is not a passive state but a demanding spiritual discipline. On this view, the inability of many men to receive a self from the world is not a personal failing alone but a symptom of environments that reward projection, speed, and performance.

The concept of self-compassion, which appears in the paper’s reference list through the work of Kristin Neff and colleagues, offers an empirical bridge between the philosophical argument and clinical practice. Meta-analytic evidence, including a 2019 review of randomized controlled trials in Mindfulness, supports self-compassion interventions for improving psychosocial outcomes, and research by Breines and Chen has shown that self-compassion can increase rather than decrease motivation for self-improvement, countering the worry that gentleness toward oneself breeds complacency. For men whose sick-soul condition involves harsh self-judgment, the cultivation of a receptive stance toward one’s own suffering may be a precondition for any outward transformation. One cannot listen to the world while at war with oneself.

The paper’s placement within pastoral psychology is significant for how its argument is meant to land. Pastoral caregivers occupy a position distinct from clinicians, in that they are explicitly concerned with questions of meaning, purpose, and ultimate reality, not only symptom reduction. A pastoral framework allows the authors to treat the twice-born transformation as a genuinely religious category while keeping it in conversation with psychological science. The preparation of the article for the 2026 Philadelphia Group for Pastoral Theology with Boys and Men indicates that its intended audience consists of practitioners who work directly with men in religious contexts, where the language of surrender, vocation, and being called retains natural currency.

What the study ultimately contributes is a reframing of the question that men in crisis ask themselves. The dominant cultural script tells a struggling man that he must pull himself together, define a goal, and impose it on his circumstances, an instruction that assumes the self is something he already possesses and merely needs to deploy. The Jamesian account advanced by Clements and Teeter inverts this assumption. The self in crisis is precisely the self that cannot be deployed, and the way forward runs through a discipline of listening in which roles, purpose, and self-understanding are received from a world that has not, in fact, gone silent. Transformation, on this view, begins not with a declaration but with an ear.

Subject of Research: The role of receptive listening in masculine psychological and spiritual transformation, drawing on William James's concept of the sick soul.

Article Title: Listening for Transformation: Masculinity, the Sick Soul, and the Receptive Self

Article References: Clements, C., & Teeter, J. (2026). Listening for Transformation: Masculinity, the Sick Soul, and the Receptive Self. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01368-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01368-x

Keywords: masculinity, William James, sick soul, receptivity, listening guide, pastoral psychology, patriarchy, mental health, transformation, modernity, Christian tradition, MeToo