The Man of the House: Commentary on Thomas Burkhalter’s “Foregrounding Masculinities in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy”

Abstract

Thomas Burkhalter is complemented on so vividly bringing the reader into his personal struggles to find a true masculinity in the unforgiving context of contemporary South Africa where White masculinity is associated with apartheid. The struggle to be free of old identifications with the patriarchal order and gender binaries saturate the paper, and attention is drawn to the lingering presence of older conceptions of masculinity as a monolithic concept that leaves women as victims and nurturers and the male as dominant. Burkhalter’s clinical vignette is examined and found to illustrate well his struggle and to capture the vulnerability to genderized enactments and the enduring presence of the old order manifested by a reliance on defense analysis that constrains his construal of Mr. Jones’s statement that he is “after all the man in the house.” Potential alternative meanings of this phrase that foreground grief, hope, and a plea for companioning in pain are offered and a deeper engagement with Mr. and Mrs. Jones’s conscious and unconscious worlds is encouraged.

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Notes on contributors

Robert Grossmark

Robert Grossmark, Ph.D., teaches and supervises at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis, The National Institute for the Psychotherapies, The Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society, and the clinical psychology doctoral program at the City University of New York. He co-edited The One & The Many: Relational Approaches to Group Psychotherapy and Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory, both published by Routledge.