Rethinking the Psychoanalysis of Masculinity

Rethinking the Psychoanalysis of Masculinity

Author: Karl Figlio

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-19

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1003807836

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Drawing on a broad range of psychoanalytic, cultural and social influences, the author examines the concept of toxic masculinity for how it brings into focus a widespread anxiety about toxicity throughout daily life: In nature, society and personal relationships. Aggressive, misogynistic masculinity has become a major topic in recent years, spreading throughout popular culture, the media and research. Often called 'phallic,' it simmers in everyday life and hits the headlines for turning florid and violent in maintaining its dominance, especially towards women. But at the extreme, phallic masculinity has recently crystallized in a very different form, as toxic masculinity, and 'toxic' has become the near-universal epithet for all forms of extreme destructiveness in a 'toxic culture.' It has brought into focus, and named as masculine, an anxiety over toxicity in every corner of everyday life. Exploring toxic masculinity in depth brings out a misogynistic current that pervades individual and social realms, but also throws a sharp light on normal masculinity. By elaborating on the roots of this toxicity, Figlio is able to draw out a different, more positive alternative for masculinity, with particular reference to the underlying fears around fertility and the seminal. With a strong research and clinical base, this book is essential reading for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists and cultural and social theorists interested in exploring concepts of masculinity.


Masculinity and Its Discontents

Masculinity and Its Discontents

Author: Michael J. Diamond

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-24

Total Pages: 135

ISBN-13: 1000405826

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of Masculinity

The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of Masculinity

Author: Christina Wieland

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-08-13

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1317684133

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of Masculinity: A psychoanalytic approach attempts to describe in psychoanalytic terms the psychological consequences of massive social trauma and national humiliation, and the regression that takes place within the individual under these circumstances. The book is not about understanding fascism as a historical, political or sociological phenomenon, but about understanding the special relationship between masculinity and fascism and the state of mind which both shaped, and was shaped by, the historical phenomenon of fascism. Christina Wieland explores fascism as a product of certain forms of masculinity and focuses on the dynamics of masculinity as a mode of psychic functioning. She examines in detail masculine anxieties and defences and their interaction with stresses of modernity and with the social and political unrest that followed World War One. The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of Masculinity is divided into four parts: Part One – The meaning of fascism and the fascist state of mind – theories and definitions Part Two – Masculinity, its meaning and its vulnerability Part Three – Group and group theory, and the total environment Part Four – Exploring the links between masculinity, groups and fascism The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of Masculinity uses clinical material, literary texts, and extensive psychoanalytic interpretation of some passages from Mein Kampf to illustrate the interplay of the psychological processes with social and political events. This book will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, teachers and students of psychoanalysis and gender studies. It will also appeal to those interested in the application of psychoanalytic insights in the understanding of social and political phenomena.


Transforming Masculinities

Transforming Masculinities

Author: Vic Seidler

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-03-20

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1134198213

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Critically exploring the ways in which men and masculinities are commonly theorized, this multidisciplinary text opens up a discussion around such relationships, and shows that, as with feminisms, there is a diversity of theoretical traditions. It draws on a variety of examples, and explores new directions in the complexities of diverse male identities and emotional lives across different histories, cultures and traditions. This book: considers the experiences of different generations explores connections between masculinity and drugs investigates men and masculinities in a post-9/11 world considers new ways of thinking about male violence recognizes the importance of culture and provides spaces to explore different class, ‘race’ and ethnic masculinities. Written in a practical, versatile manner by an established author in this field, it points to new directions in thinking, and makes essential reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in the fields of sociology, gender studies, politics, philosophy and psychology.


Young Men and Masculinities

Young Men and Masculinities

Author: Victor J. Seidler

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2013-07-04

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1848138059

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this book Victor J Seidler, one of the leading contributors to the growing debate about masculinities, turns his attention to the lives of young men and their understandings of themselves as gendered beings. By contextualizing their experiences and subjectivities within a rapidly globalizing world, Seidler pays particular attention to the impact of the global media. How does the mass circulation of images of men's bodies, desires and sexualities affect their self-perception and behaviours, and how are these images framed within particular histories, cultures and traditions? Questioning universalist theories of 'hegemonic masculinities', the book argues that young men often feel caught between prevailing masculinities and their own struggle for self-definition. It explores both how the idea of men as 'the First Sex' has been established within the West and the ways in which men in other cultures and societies affirm their gendered identities. Seidler pioneers new methodologies that involve listening to the silences surrounding male experience as well as to oral testimonies. This enables innovative analysis of the contradictions young men are faced with in both creating their own gendered identities and establishing more equal relationships within a world of intense inequalities.


The Subject of Anthropology

The Subject of Anthropology

Author: Henrietta L. Moore

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-23

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0745638171

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this ambitious new book, Henrietta Moore draws on anthropology, feminism and psychoanalysis to develop an original and provocative theory of gender and of how we become sexed beings. Arguing that the Oedipus complex is no longer the fulcrum of debate between anthropology and psychoanalysis, she demonstrates how recent theorizing on subjectivity, agency and culture has opened up new possibilities for rethinking the relationship between gender, sexuality and symbolism. Using detailed ethnographic material from Africa and Melanesia to explore the strengths and weaknesses of a range of theories in anthropology, feminism and psychoanalysis, Moore advocates an ethics of engagement based on a detailed understanding of the differences and similarities in the ways in which local communities and western scholars have imaginatively deployed the power of sexual difference. She demonstrates the importance of ethnographic listening, of focused attention to people’s imaginations, and of how this illuminates different facets of complex theoretical issues and human conundrums. Written not just for professional scholars and for students but for anyone with a serious interest in how gender and sexuality are conceptualized and experienced, this book is the most powerful and persuasive assessment to date of what anthropology has to contribute to these debates now and in the future.


Psychoanalytic Approaches to Forgiveness and Mental Health

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Forgiveness and Mental Health

Author: Ronald Britton

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-16

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1000930114

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Forgiveness and Mental Health considers the role of forgiveness in mental life, concerning both forgiving and being forgiven. Each chapter addresses concepts including superego, repetition compulsion, enactment, and notions such as sacrifice, penance, justification, absolution, and contrition. The contributors consider both their professional and clinical experience and their ethical, cultural, or philosophical background when considering aspects of forgiveness and its impact on clinical practice. The book is an attempt to open the subject of forgiveness, not to reach ethical conclusions nor to formulate pious psychological behavioural axioms. It also considers the weight of feeling unforgiven and of holding the lifelong resentment or vengeful wishes of the unforgiving. Psychoanalytic Approaches to Forgiveness and Mental Health will be key reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training and for other professionals interested in the role of forgiveness in mental life. It will also be of interest to academics and students of psychoanalytic studies, philosophy and spirituality.


Boyhoods

Boyhoods

Author: Ken Corbett

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2009-09-22

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0300154941

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Familiar and expected gender patterns help us to understand boys but often constrict our understanding of any given boy. Writing in a wonderfully robust and engaging voice, Ken Corbett argues for a new psychology of masculinity, one that is not strictly dependent on normative expectation. As he writes in his introduction, “no two boys, no two boyhoods are the same.” In Boy Hoods Corbett seeks to release boys from the grip of expectation as Mary Pipher did for girls in Reviving Ophelia. Corbett grounds his understanding of masculinity in his clinical practice and in a dynamic reading of feminist and queer theories. New social ideals are being articulated. New possibilities for recognition are in play. How is a boy made between the body, the family, and the culture? Does a boy grow by identifying with his father, or by separating from his mother? Can we continue to presume that masculinity is made at home? Corbett uses case studies to defy stereotypes, depicting masculinity as various and complex. He examines the roles that parental and cultural anxiety play in development, and he argues for a more nuanced approach to cross-gendered fantasy and experience, one that does not mistake social consensus for well-being. Corbett challenges us at last to a fresh consideration of gender, with profound implications for understanding all boys.