Routledge Masculinity and Its Discontents: The Male Psyche and the Inherent Tensions of Maturing Manhood

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. Review "A leading psychoanalytic clinician scholar in gender studies, Michael J. Diamond excitingly offers this comprehensive new work on maleness. With impressive skill and deeply compassionate knowledge, he creates a richly textured sense of men’s gendered internal aspirations and lived intentions as these inhabit their bodies and animate their peopled worlds. He draws on modern Freudian theory and other psychoanalytic approaches to reveal the complex developmental struggle that men must undergo to build their identities and roles. This is a must-read, must-teach book for all psychoanalytic psychotherapists and advanced readers curious about how a man becomes known to himself." – Rosemary H. Balsam, F.R.C.Psych. (London), M.R.C.P. (Edinburgh), Yale Medical School, Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis; author of Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis (2012) and is a 2018 recipient of the Sigourney Award. "By way of this book’s provocative title, Michael J. Diamond elegantly links the covert frailties of "masculinity" to the covert frailties of its encircling "civilization." Diamond more than delivers on the title’s promise. His notion of primordial vulnerability illuminates an actual bedrock, a human one, and offers a much-needed antidote to Freud’s restrictive notion that, for men, castration anxiety can always claim the last word. Employing a wide theoretical range, Diamond’s argument reaches back more than a century and, ever alert to his contemporary surround, he points us forward toward a time when we might all think more clearly and work more effectively on the actual sources of our shared discontents". – Donald B. Moss, M.D., is the author of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Man (2012) and Hating in the First Person Plural (2003). He is also Chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Program Committee. "In this insightful book, Michael J. Diamond brings together decades of his impressive psychoanalytic scholarship on male identity formation pressured by cultural ideals of manhood. Diamond underscores the tenuous nature of masculinity, detailing the vulnerabilities inherent in male development within famili