Reading Between the Lines

Abstract

This article discusses the relative merits of psychoanalytic and psychodiscursive approaches to the study of masculinities and men's violence. The case histories of four men are presented and analyzed. Two of these men were antisexist men seeking to help other men to change, and the other two were men who were getting help to stop being violent. Using these case histories, this article seeks to demonstrate that psychic experience is not a simple product of social discourses, and therefore masculinity cannot be straightforwardly read off from what men say. The article concludes by arguing that the psychoanalytic notion of a defended subject draws our attention to the unities among men more effectively than psychodiscursive approaches precisely because it is able to acknowledge biographically mediated differences between men.In their article "Towards a New Sociology of Masculinity," Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell, and John Lee (1985, 566) urged sociologists of gender to focus their attention on the "conflict within masculinity" as much as the conflicts between and among men and women. Against a "powerful current in feminism," Carrigan, Connell, and Lee argued that the relationships between men's social power and men's violence needed to be theorized in ways that did not reduce masculinity (or masculinities) to the "unrelieved villainy" of patriarchal men (p. 552). Carrigan, Connell, and Lee's critique of the oversocialized actor assumed in gender role theory, together with their debunking of the presumption of a "normative standard case" to be measured and proven by social scientific research, sent a clear message to orthodox psychology: namely, that its concepts and practices had blinded its practitioners to the relational quality of gender and the structuring of gender relations. Carrigan, Connell, and Lee identified psychoanalysis as "a more complex and powerful tool" (p. 580) for thinking through the "psychodynamics of masculinity," psychodynamics that should "not been seen as a separate issue from the social relations that invest and construct masculinity" (p. 598).Bob Connell's (1983Connell's ( , 1989Connell's ( , 1995Connell's ( , 1998) subsequent attempts to develop this thesis emphasized the strategic structuring of gender relations within a gender order in which some groups of men constantly seek to secure power over other men and women. Connell also reiterated his belief that psychoanalysis held untapped critical and subversive tools for thinking about the connections between social structure and the psyche (Connell 1983, 13). In particular, Connell (1995, chap. 1; made much of the Freudian insight that masculinity and femininity are not "essences" but cathextic components of experience that men and women negotiate subjectively and intersubjectively. This is why human personalities are multilayered, contradictory, and complexly shaded in character.Linking these insights with a Gramscian model of social relations, Connell showed how in the institutional and interactional struggles of everyday life (patterned ...

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