Abstract
Drawing on the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life and my own experience of participation in and facilitation of men’s groups, this article seeks to appraise the central character’s emotional range and intensity, charting parallels between George Bailey and Parsifal, the Grail Knight, whose story forms the spine of Robert A. Johnson’s book He: Understanding Masculine Psychology (1991).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Hank Earl retired in 2015 after working for the London Borough of Hackney for 37 years, predominantly as a social worker in the field of adult mental health. For the past 13 years he has been co-leading men’s groups with Nick Duffell and, more recently, Manu Bazzano, under the aegis of the Centre for Gender Psychology.