Masculinity, Complex: A Historical Take

Abstract

The author recapitulates the history of the changes in second-wave feminist psychoanalytic thinking regarding masculinity, beginning with the critique of the Freudian-Lacanian position of phallic monism adumbrated by Juliet Mitchell. It traces the reversal brought about by the North American position, represented by Stoller and Chodorow, that emphasized the boy’s problem in breaking his primary identification with the mother. Continuing, the author summarizes her own critique of the oedipal model and have-have-not binary that it dictated as well as her own outline of preoedipal “homoerotic identificatory love” and the overinclusive nature of early identifications. In addition, she includes her understanding of the Oedipus as founded in the repudiation of passivity and its projection into the female “Other,” the daughter position. Along the way she points to how a number of other feminist psychoanalytic thinkers took the idea of postoedipal and overinclusive thinking further and in a more critical direction.

Notes

¹ In the overinclusive preoedipal phase, castration means the threat of “losing” what the other has whereas in the oedipal phase it refers to the threat of losing what one does have precisely because one is trying to have the opposite, other sex, but the two are mutually exclusive.

² Back when I first put this notion forward, self psychology openly embraced everyone’s need for idealization and mirroring but missed its gender and erotic aspects; on the other hand there were constant catastrophes in Freudian analyses as the need for this mutual idealization was denigrated (along with homosexuality), the need for recognition and mirroring were missed, as the analyst tried to retain the phallic position of knowledge as power.

³ A discussion of the relationship between male sexuality, and the failures of a maternal container for excitement, can be found in Benjamin and Atlas (2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica Benjamin

Jessica Benjamin, Ph.D., is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City, where she is a supervising faculty member at the New York University Postdoctoral Psychology Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and at the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies.