The Elusiveness of Masculinity: Primordial Vulnerability, Lack, and The Challenges of Male Development

Abstract

Reaching beyond the Oedipus prototype to address the unrepresentable vulnerability founded on the boy's infantile helplessness in contact with the mother's body, the author aims to identify the inherent tensions and enigmas of being male. He proposes that both the repudiation of femininity and the overvaluation of phallicity are unconsciously constructed to withstand the fundamental deficiency grounded in the asymmetry of the boy's prephallic relation with his primary object. This bodily based primordial vulnerability, marked by absence and lack, remains elusive-an unsymbolizable experience that provides the archaic matrix for adaptive and defensive phallicism, the oedipal complex, and genital progression. A clinical vignette is presented to illustrate these concepts.

The Innate Capacity for Representing Subjective Experience: The Infant’s Mind is Neither Primitive nor Prerepresentational

“…B. Stern and H. Levine are perhaps the most prominent authors offering us their versions of "unformulated" or "unrepresented" experience. But similar ideas have been taken up by many other analytic theorists, too many to list comprehensively, but some of those writing most recently, especially in the "unrepresented" category, include Diamond (2014Diamond ( , 2015Diamond ( , 2020, Busch (2011Busch ( , 2016, Bergstein (2016Bergstein ( , 2018, Botella and Botella (2005), Sopher (2018), Katz (2016), Vartzopoulos and Beratis (2012), Canestri (2004), andBohleber et al (2013). These authors refer to others from past decades who have inspired them, such as Sullivan (1940), Bion (1965, 1970, Green (1975), and Aisenstein (1993, 2006.…”

Recovering the Father in Mind and Flesh: History, Triadic Functioning, and Developmental Implications

“…This factor is crucial to the child's ability to internalize the father's healthy presence, along with the paternal function itself. Mothers play a significant role in furthering the passage from the narcissistic to the symbolic father, and in this respect, they also help separate the child from the father to become daddy's “little girl” or “little man” (Diamond ; Perelberg ). However, we need not assume that the mother simply internalizes the father's paternal function; rather, the task of separating herself from the child may be carried out by the mother as a result of her own desire (Fiorini ).…”

“…Such tutelage ideally suggests an approach that “subsumes an appreciation of a child's otherness, a capacity to thoughtfully reflect on oneself, the courage to act or choose not to when necessary, and the [ desire and] willingness to remain involved and engaged throughout … an ever‐changing, lifelong process” (Diamond , p. 206, italics in original). In short, the work of fatherhood is an endeavor requiring the unconscious transmission and integration of the father's phallic and genital facets of his masculinity (Diamond , , ).…”

The Missing Father Function in Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique: The Analyst’s Internal Couple and Maturing Intimacy

“…Psychoanalysts today fully realize a father's influence on his child's reality‐based ego functioning and object relations, both in dyadic (preoedipal) and triadic (oedipal) paternal countenance (Diamond , ). Moreover, the core structure of human relatedness is triangular (Aisenstein ), and it is “the fate of the human psyche to have always two objects and never one alone” (Green , p. 146).…”