Masculinity and Its Discontents

The Male Psyche and the Inherent Tensions of Maturing Manhood

Michael J. Diamond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367724047
• eBook ISBN: 9781000405828
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Offering a uniquely psychoanalytic developmental perspective on male gender identity and the sense of maleness, this book provides an in-depth analysis of the development of masculinity in childhood and its continued evolution throughout a man's life.

Drawing on classical Freudian theory, as well as on more contemporary psychoanalytic theories, this book explores early infancy and child development, preoedipal factors and the oedipal complex, the influence of parenting and the unconscious transmission of gendered factors both by mothers and both biological and symbolic fathers, the male ego ideal, social, cultural, and biological influences, the role of inherent psychic bi-genderality in the context of gender binaries, and the inherent gendered tensions and challenges experienced as an individual progresses into adult and later life. This book is original in its characterization of the male developmental trajectory as underpinned by psychoanalytic principles pertaining to conflict and inherent tensions that continue throughout the life cycle and strongly impact other areas of life. Deeply rooted in the unconscious, a man's multiply determined sense of masculinity requires deconstructing the mother, the feminine, and the other in the male psyche. As the text illustrates via clinical vignettes, an awareness and an understanding of these areas can improve the clinical work of psychoanalysts working with men who struggle with the intrinsic conflicts in their sense of maleness.

This book will be of great clinical value to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and other mental health practitioners, and will stimulate the thinking of scholars in such areas as gender theory, psychodynamic and sociocultural aspects of gender roles, and the changing social definition of masculinity.

1 The roots of male gender identity: an introductory overview

This chapter presents a historical overview of psychoanalytic thinking about gender and masculinity, beginning with Freud. I then present my own view, which is that the prephallic, phallic, and genital features of a man’s internal experience are best understood as coexisting positions in varying, dis-continuous balances that shift as a man matures, rather than representing distinct developmental phases that supersede one another in linear fashion. Other post-Freudian theoretical developments within the field are presented and discussed at length, including some key contemporary perspectives on gender. Implications for psychoanalytic treatment are discussed, as well as the concepts of gender binaries and phallic logic. I also discuss at length the dis-identification theory and its status as a widely accepted theory of male de-velopment, after which I explain my own revisioning of this theory in light of new ways of thinking about men and masculinity that have emerged in recent decades-both in psychoanalysis and, more generally, in Western culture.

Masculinity and psychoanalysis: beyond the Freudian bedrock

Until four or more decades ago, the psychoanalytic study of male development was essentially organized around Freud’s oedipal theory and the crucial idea that the boy wants to have his mother (Freud 1923, 1924, 1925). With Oedipus as exemplar, it was assumed that, in order to overcome castration anxieties aroused in competing with his father, the boy identifies with him, and in turn constructs the sense of his own masculine identity—namely, his sense of maleness. In short, classical oedipal theorizing centers on the boy’s phylogenetically derived incestuous, competitive, and patricidal impulses accompanied by talionic castration anxieties, while essentially omitting the significance of the primacy of the other—i.e., the mother—in the earliest, prephallic realm. Before discussing this earlier realm, however, I wish to note that the underlying frailty of masculinity I will emphasize is embedded in the oedipal myth in Oedipus’s being abandoned by his father, Laius, to die on a hillside, along with Oedipus’s wounded feet, blinding, and late-life dependence on his daughter, Antigone.

Freud’s ideas about masculinity are implicit in his drive-based descriptions of active and passive drive aims, which arguably become located in gendered terms during the phallic stage (Freud 1905), later considered the infantile genital stage (Freud 1923). During this stage, upon discovering anatomical differences between the sexes, the young child recognizes that he or she is missing an anatomical part possessed by the opposite sex and, in turn, experiences castration anxiety (the little boy) or penis envy (the little girl). Consequently, the boy’s active infantile genital (drive) aim, then, is to do something with the object, to penetrate like a man, whereas his passive aim is to have something done to him, to be genitally penetrated like a woman.

However, in the equation of masculinity with activity and femininity with passivity, as exemplified in referring to the male’s bedrock struggle “against his passive or feminine attitude toward another male” (Freud 1937, p. 250), as well as the boy’s “typically masculine … special interest in his father” (Freud 1921, p. 105, italics added), both the neglect of prephallic vulnerability and the rejection of femininity were furthered. This problematic account of masculinity was extended when Freud (ibid.) argued that the repudiation of femininity, the so-called “masculine protest,” reflects a “biological fact”—which, he added, is “nothing else than castration anxiety” (pp. 252–253). As a result, gender-related forms of distress were erroneously attributed to the male’s failure to repudiate femininity.

Freud believed that the male’s repressed wish for the missing genital structure and its associated receptive aims and desires set the stage for men’s highly conflicted psychic bisexuality, which opposes the work of psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, as I will argue, in order to contain and begin to symbolize the specific vulnerabilities and enigmas of gender difference, “everyone must reckon with their capacity for receptivity and thrust, accessibility and force, openness and backbone … the feminine and masculine within us all” (Celenza 2010, p. 202, italics added).

This confusion between receptivity and passivity, between the masculine and the feminine, and between psychodynamics and biology, continues to collude with cultural assumptions and hinders theorizing about masculinity (as well as femininity). To be sure, Freud left us with numerous “impossible tasks,” one of which “has been the conceptualization of bedrock” (Moss 2012, p. 94)—namely, the male’s conflict-laden psychic bisexuality, which reflects his disposition to seek out what Freud (1905) understood to be both active and passive drive aims.

To better understand these themes and their relevance to the male developmental trajectory, let’s begin by considering the earliest realm.

The prephallic realm and the male’s primordial vulnerability

A key point I wish to make is that the prephallic, phallic, and genital features of a man’s internal experience are best understood as coexisting positions in varying, discontinuous balances that shift as a man matures (much like the Kleinian notion of paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions), rather than representing different developmental phases that supersede one another in a linear way. A man’s primordial vulnerability, marked by absence and lack, serves as the foundation for structuring his sense of masculinity. As a necessary fact of life, that primordial vulnerability proves integral to a fluid yet sufficiently balanced phallic/genital progression among prephallic, phallic, and genital interior positions.

Incorporating the idea of the primacy of the male’s essential primordial vulnerability helps us better understand and appreciate the challenges in reworking the internal phallic and genital positions, characterized by dualities grounded in the male body accompanied by intrapsychic conflicts pertaining to penetration and receptivity, delinking and binding together, as well as renunciation and incorporation. A boy’s differentiation from his mother and his identification with and by both mother and father, including their unconscious, rather inexplicable sexualized messages pertaining to his maleness—sexualized in the Freudian infantile polymorphous, pregenital sense—profoundly influence his gendered ego ideals, while his gender ambiguities are continually being reworked (Corbett 2011; Diamond 2009). Consequently, to paraphrase Freud, in order to truly understand “what men really want,” we will also need to address the prephallic realm, wherein what I term primordial vulnerability resides.

Negotiating the oscillating passages between and among the prephallic, phallic, and genital positions requires accommodations to one’s primordial vulnerability and incompleteness that present every male—who is inevitably born of a sexually different other (his mother)—with unique and lifelong challenges entailing ongoing conflict, confusion, and psychic effort. Consequently, in expanding on Freudian bedrock and preoedipal individuation, perhaps we might utilize Achilles’s powerless heel barring immortality to serve as a prototype with which to better understand the formation of the originary, prephallic allocation (Laplanche 1992), as well as the preoedipal, narcissistic foundations of the structures of masculinity (Diamond 2004b, 2015). Although the latter will be elaborated in Chapters 2 and 3, it may be helpful to note here also that the male’s phallic narcissism may help defend against the terrifying annihilation dangers associated with the young man’s unrepresentable, primal, and bodily based vulnerability that, like Achilles’s heel, signifies the fragility inherent in mortality.

This is aptly and movingly expressed in Stephen Dunn’s (2004) poem “Achilles in Love,” in which the poet describes how carefully Achilles hides his weakness inside reinforced boots, resulting in a certain invulnerability but also in a sense of aloneness, even in the company of others. Only when Achilles allows another to penetrate his defenses does he learn that love demands a degree of self-exposure.

The idea of masculinity surpassing the necessity of any repudiation or delinking, as well as overcoming constriction, inescapable confusion, and unsettling conflict, represents an impossible, fantastic, and utopian vision of an idealized masculinity that does not in fact exist. In contrast, I propose that, due to its foundation in the boy’s primordial vulnerability signified by lack, incompleteness, and being less than, masculinity always needs to be proven and affirmed. This results in both hetero- and homosexual males’ lifelong task of looking into metaphorical mirrors—including the analyst’s mirror—to determine if they are really “men” (Moss 2012).

Implications for psychoanalytic treatment

A successful psychoanalytic process can usefully impact a man’s relationship to what inexorably remains an elusive and essentially enigmatic sense of “masculinity”—the irreducible predicament of being male—with its primordial vulnerability, archaic anxieties, and psychic bisexuality. These pervasive and defining elements, when taken together, reflect what I suggest be more aptly termed psychic bigenderality, which I will discuss further later in this and subsequent chapters. In this respect, as I will address in Chapter 8, the resumption of the unconscious bisexualization process, entailing ubiquitous and inescapable bigendered tensions, represents a primary aim of analytic treatment.

In analysis, male patients delimited by the phallic, narcissistic polarity of penetrable/impenetrable ego ideals that precludes accepting the object dependence of human existence—a polarity originating in their primordial vulnerability—are forced to deal with disturbances accompanying the dismantling of male certitude, most forcibly in the arena of gender identity. However, the conundrum of masculinity can never be resolved or settled once and for all; rather, it can only be contained through partial integration. Though it may seem implausible or even utopian, when successful, a new definition of what it means to be a man can be largely reconciled with the more rigid notion of masculinity formed early on. In a man’s tolerance and management of the enigmas and tensions of masculinity through the analytic process, the passage from pathological dependence and/or rigidly defensive independence can take place, and his fundamental relational nature can be fully embraced.

I will next turn briefly to the rather controversial concept of gender and consider its psychoanalytic history, postponing until later chapters the further discussion of various aspects of the concept.

Anatomy, destiny, and gender

Whereas Freud did not use the terms gender or gender identity or explore such areas, several generations of psychoanalytic theorists have grappled with gender-related issues, as well as with questions raised by Freud’s original ideas on psychosexual development. Gender and gender identity (to be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2) were introduced by the biologically oriented psychologist John Money (Money, Hampson, and Hampson 1955, 1957) and integrated into psychoanalytic thought by Robert Stoller (1964, 1968). Freud did not have the words since in the German language, Geschlecht means both sex and gender.

Nonetheless, the idea was not lacking for Freud, given his ongoing effort to resolve the riddle of masculinity / femininity, which he understood to be a mixture of the psychological, biological, and sociological. As I will further elaborate in the next chapter, it is noteworthy that Freud (1925), due to operating from a phallocentric perspective favoring male subjectivity, initially tackled these issues through his account of how the young child’s discovery of the anatomical differences between the sexes, with the resulting castration anxiety or penis envy, influences male and female psychosexual development.

However, Freud’s famous dictum that “anatomy is destiny” is no longer the linchpin of psychoanalytic gender theorizing. As I discuss in Chapter 6, research on the masculinization of the brain or lack thereof, as well as male-female genetic differences, demonstrate that several biological variables are related to specific gender-related traits, maturational challenges, and intrapsychic conflicts commonly experienced by males. Nonetheless, on the basis of clinical evidence, the biological givens in gender identity formation are significantly counterbalanced by what psychoanalysis emphasizes. For the boy, as I elaborate in Chapter 3, the construction of gender identity—his sense of maleness—is mainly determined by the early imprinting of the actual interactions with his primary attachment figures, including the mother’s implanting of her unconscious reactions to her son’s maleness; his internalized object relations; the prevailing sociocultural determinants; and most importantly, his unique, psychodynamically influenced reactions to each of these determinants, particularly as they interact with his basic biological development. The process of adopting a masculine or a feminine identity entails translations, fantasies, and identifications with and identifications by the mother (and the fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The roots of male gender identity: an introductory overview
• 2 An integrative perspective on “masculine” gender and bigenderality
• 3 The shaping of masculinity in early childhood
• 4 The impact of actual and symbolic fathering on masculinity
• 5 The impact of mother and mother-with-father together
• 6 Social, cultural, and biological influences on the concepts of masculinity and gender: constructing the male ego ideal
• 7 Maturing masculinity, receptivity, and gender fluidity: its trajectory through midlife transitions and later life changes
• 8 Gender and masculinity in analytic practice, and concluding thoughts
• References
• Index