Editorial

Men clothe themselves in masculinity; that is, they take on their character as apparel, and fear losing it just as easily as they put it on. That is the profound point of the old proverb and the title of Tom Ryan's paper, ‘Clothes maketh the man’.

In public life, cultural productions, including psychoanalysis, are among the clothes through which men become masculine. The masculinity of these cultural productions can also be as easily removed as they were put on. Almost as soon as Freud said in 1923 that the boy built his identity on an identification with father (p. 31), clinical attention turned to the complexities and vicissitudes of dis-identification with mother. In 1926, Karen Horney recast the inferiority and the penis envy of the female, the castrated male of classical psychoanalytic theory. She said, ‘The present analytical picture of feminine development differs in no case by a hair's breadth from the typical ideas that the boy has of the girl’ (p. 327). In other words, if a boy were a girl, he would feel inferior. By contrast, he clothes himself in his masculine superiority. From Horney on, the clothes of masculinity have been scrutinized in ever greater detail.

In this volume, Marie Maguire argues that there is a residual identification with mother, which is highly ambivalent. In cases in which father does not have, or is excluded from, a role in the boy's masculine identifications, these identifications may be based on mother's phallic potency and may remain insecure and conflicted. She explores the implications of these ambivalent identifications in the relationship between a female psychotherapist and a male patient.

Brian Denness elaborates on the ceremonies of initiation into manhood, which often involves physical marking of the body, such as tattooing or piercing, as the imposition of the reality of castration and of the paternal order. He argues that the paternal order can be radically avoided - preoedipally foreclosed, in Lacanian thinking - leaving