The “M” Word: Fears and Fantasies

The increasingly widespread attention paid to mentorship has led to producing an elastic and hollow usage of the term. Mentor has become a buzzword, bandied about generically and without much thought to describe almost anyone who even loosely fits the concept, including admired teachers, bosses, psychotherapists, sports coaches, literary heroes, parents, spiritual gurus, political figures, and so on. The relaxed usage seems to be based, in part, on a grammatical slip: that is, the word mentor—a noun—has been transfigured into a verb. Like the misnomer of saying that anyone who mothers is a mother, our lexicon permits anyone who mentors to be deemed a mentor.

Interestingly, while the term seems unfettered in popular culture, in serious conversation about mentorship the oppo-

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site seems to hold true. A fair amount of deliberation actually goes into thinking about and deciding to name a relationship a mentorship. Indeed, a study I conducted a few years ago on the psychodynamics of long-term professional mentoring relationships revealed that the process of identifying a relationship as a mentorship carries with it a distinct emotional charge. When I asked someone if he or she regarded an influential person in his or her life as a “mentor”—specifically using that language—the response was often tentative or qualified. A number of people squirmed and replied, “It depends on what you mean by mentor.” Unclear about how the term should be used, many groped for fixed criteria, wanting me to lead in setting the parameters of meaning. Partly, this is because the social rules for labeling someone a “mentor” are not set. Despite the fact that a good deal of mentorship is “in the eye of the beholden,” as David Lazar facetiously put it (The Ohio Review, v. 51, 1994), individuals tend to be uneasy about affixing this name to their mentor-like relationships.

I wondered why people seemed timid about or even averse to using the term. Why would a protégé of a rising star in the modern dance world, for example, describe herself to me as being “receptive to learning in that particular way,” but quickly add, “I still hate calling it ‘mentoring’.” Why, at an annual conference for female executives titled “Building Bridges: How to Build a Powerful Network. How to Find a Mentor. How to Be One,” would the keynote speaker say that the term “scares people off”? For one thing, the act of naming a relationship a “mentorship” can seem daring as it announces something about the identity of the connection that may be called into question by the other party. “What if,” frets the junior colleague, “my boss who I so highly regard doesn’t think of himself as my mentor? What if he doesn’t think of us as having such a special relationship?” The issue of reciprocity in the naming process can stir up anxiety. One risk is the exposure and humiliation of overstating the level of intimacy, commit-

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ment, and significance of a relationship by using a terminology that may be unrequited.

Conversations about naming, including whether and when to use the “M” word were among the most revealing discussions in my study—uncovering fears and fantasies about power, control, idealization, loyalty, obligation, dependence, merger, and generativity. How each person interpreted and applied the terms of mentorship brought to light some of the underlying wishes and conflicts they imported into these alliances. Talk about the word “mentor,” put simply, stimulated deeper reflection on the psychodynamics of their own relationships.

For some, naming oneself a “mentor” implied self-aggrandizement, a puffing up of one’s influence on another person. One protégé, a 40-something-year-old woman in advertising, described her supervisor as “embarrassed that she even thought of herself as a mentor.” Although it became clear during our interview that the mentor was not only comfortable enacting the role of teacher, role model, and sponsor—she was actually a staunch actress in each of these mentoring roles—she didn’t like to admit this. Laced with Midwestern reserve, she distanced herself from the title of mentor because it conveyed an air of self-importance, a kind of hubris, a social taboo from where she came.

In other cases, mentors shied away from the title because of fears of getting caught up in long-term obligation. Signaling tension, a junior faculty member at a small liberal arts college noted that her mentor’s “first reaction [to participating in this study] was ‘are we in a mentor relationship?’” Indeed, playing down her effect on the protégé was part of what made the mentor “an attractive person—she does not know her own power…or charisma.” Curiously, I found this otherwise intrepid senior professor anxious at the mere suggestion that she could wield such intense influence over others. Somewhat

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withholding as a mentor, she drew boundaries constantly to buffer herself from the neediness of the protégé learner, afraid, I thought, of the possibility of quashing her younger colleague with her potent intellect and courageous academic positions. Still, this mentor’s even greater anxiety had to do with dependence. She worried that making any gestures that would amplify the significance of the relationship (for example, openly acknowledging it as a mentorship) might be read by the protégé as an invitation to maintain a lifetime connection to her. She didn’t want the strings attached to her, mentorship represented a slippery slope to engulfment.

Concerns about boundary maintenance were prominent in discussions with another mentor pair: the modern dancers mentioned earlier. Though claiming, “I don’t really call myself her mentor,” this leader in experimental dance conceded that the term was palatable only if the counterpart term was “not protégé. “Protégé to me,” she explained, “means formed in one’s own image…[implying] a degree of investment on the part of the older person that’s not healthy—that their sense of self-esteem and ego gratification [are] bound up in the achievement of the younger person.” Going on to render the mentor/protégé dyad as “creepy” gave us a vivid imago of this woman’s uneasiness about mentorship merger. The idea that the disciple would be unable to separate herself from her mentor’s persona and, as the corollary, that the mentor’s narcissistic pleasures would vicariously hinge on the disciple’s success seemed inevitable, if not discursively managed.

While many are put off by the emotional burdens they read into the terms mentor and protégé, some seize on these words for their seductive potential. Fantasies of control and professional ascendancy fuel shallow use of these words to engineer adulation, compliance, and productivity from would-be protégés. A mid-level manager at a pharmaceutical firm announced to her assistant of several weeks that she would “be her mentor.” Simply calling the relationship a

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“mentorship”—a naming by fiat, however, did not make it one. The protégé confided to me that it took her a good year before she felt it fitting to regard her boss as a mentor. When she finally did refer to her boss as “mentor,” it was wrapped as an emotional gift—similar to the sentiment expressed by the daughter-in-law who takes the step to call her husband’s mother, “Mom.”

These illustrations highlight the fact that by naming a mentorship, the emotional associations the term conjures up are viewed as a declaration of commitment to perceiving the relationship in a particular cast as opposed to having it remain in a nominal limbo. Yet, there are no markers for deciding at what point a relation moves from a garden-variety professional or personal relationship into a mentorship. Parties might recognize the existence of a special bond but feel unclear about what language to use to describe this quality. A useful analogy is the dating couple who grapple with whether to think about and refer to one another as “friends,” “lovers,” or “significant others,” and when to make shifts in attribution from one to another. However arbitrary, each naming creates a frame for the relation and as such becomes part of its discursive construction—reflecting and shaping how partners orient themselves towards each other. “The existence of a relationship is at least partly (but importantly), a result of a certain set of people coming to agree that there is one” according to Stephen Duck. “[O]nce partners come not only to believe that they are in a certain sort of relationship but to discuss and share that belief, then their discourse alters correspondingly” (Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, v.12, 1995, p. 537). In the case of mentorship, not only does their talk change, so does their concept of the emotional connection. While it articulates a more explicit outline for the relationship, using the “M” word saddles parties with expectations and responsibilities and an infusion of conscious and unconscious psychic fantasies, longings, and anxieties.

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