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The mythopoetic men's movement has tried to recreate male initiation for current American conditions. Feminists, among others, have criticized this effort as simply continuing patriarchal forms of oppression. The problem is to develop a morally acceptable account of male initiation, framed within depth psychology and the Western cultural tradition. This dissertation uses a hermeneutical method as defined by Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Foucault. Male initiations vary between two poles, patrilineal and matrilineal, also called spirit and soul, transcendent and immanent. When feminists criticize initiation, they have in mind the patrilineal and its cultural descendents. The men's movement tries to combine both but remains patrilineal through lack of clarity. In fact, the two forms are inherently in contradiction, although both are necessary; hence initiation's character as a mystery. Depth psychology's view of initiation, including Henderson's distinction between hero and initiate, must be broadened to include this contradiction. Drawing upon Jung, Kohut, and their successors, this dissertation looks at initiation in anthropology (e.g. Mead, Bateson, Layard) and in the Western literary and religious tradition (e.g. Orestes and Oedipus, the orthodox and Gnostic Jesus, Perceval/Parzival, even Hiawatha). The final focus is Hamlet, who acknowledges opposing patrilineal and matrilineal demands as he struggles for integrity. His initiation develops through his relationships with others, who serve both as Kohutian selfobjects and as feeling-toned imagos of Jungian archetypal complexes. In the success of his failure, he advances a tradition that acknowledges the matrilineal side of initiation, seen also in Apuleius' Cult of Isis, the Gnostic Sophia, the Hermetic Anthropos, and the metals, salts, sulphurs, and regimens of Renaissance alchemy. This tradition connects depth psychology, with its three types of selfobjects; (Kohut), four masculine archetypes (Moore & Gillette), and various autonomous complexes (Jung, Sandner & Beebe), to the seven initiatory figures imagined traditionally as the planets and in Hamlet as the play's dominant characters.