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Ken Corbett has been working at the cutting edge of feminism, queer studies, and gender theory for twenty years. In Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinity, he brilliantly incorporates these perspectives into his clinical work with children and their parents. Corbett's plan is to reopen central premises regarding masculine development, hoping to lay the groundwork for a psychoanalytic theory that is closer to a boy's experience and reflective of the lives lived by boys (and men) in today's societies. The book transcends its mission, conveying the life and vitality of boyhood so lyrically that it will appeal to anyone aching to remember and to everyone who works with children.
Part I of the book, Boys, Masculinity, and the Family, reworks two papers first published in Psychoanalytic Quarterly. Each shows a boy's masculinity unfolding in relation to his particular set of parents and the society in which they live. In “Little Hans: Masculinity Foretold,” Corbett shows how Freud “parses and whittles” Hans's material, directing the father/analyst's interpretations to arrive at the normative oedipal narrative. Corbett's premise is that Freud “foretold” masculinity through this case, capturing certain aspects of a little boy's experience while excluding others—creating the “Ur-boy of psychoanalysis.” From Little Hans forward we know “a boy to be a boy through his phallic preoccupations and castration fears, enacted alongside and through his desire for his mother and his rivalry with his father, which in time resolve via the boy's separation from his mother and his identification with his father” (p. 19). Corbett finds an intriguing gap between Freud's emphasis on rivalry and aggression and the affective resonances of dependence and desire that emanate from the pages of the case history. “A theory of masculinity that is forged solely through competition with paternal authority, with little regard for the interplay of identifications, desire, and mutual recognition … is largely a th