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Karl Figlio's book is exactly what the title describes. It is a closely argued account of a revised psychoanalytic theory of masculinity, written from a Kleinian perspective. He has been working on these ideas for some time, in a book called Psychoanalysis, Science and Masculinity , and a 2010 paper, Phallic and Seminal Masculinity. Here he explains more fully what he means by the term “seminal”, his particularly innovative contribution to the subject.
Freud's “surprising discovery” of the pre-Oedipal dimension of early experience—“like the discovery…of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind the civilization of Greece” (Freud 1931 p.226)—led to his rethinking of female development in his late papers, Female Sexuality (1931) and On Femininity (1933), and provoked outcry among some women analysts in the psychoanalytic community. In the third of the Three Essays on the History of Sexuality, “The Transformations of Puberty”, published in 1905, he had claimed that before puberty the girl was “anaesthetic at the vaginal orifice” and was exclusively interested in clitoridal masturbation, believing her clitoris the equivalent of the boy's penis. This reflected his assumption of “phallic monism”—that for small boys and girls, there is only one genital—the penis—and that both sexes start life believing that they have it. It was the discovery of the anatomical distinction between the sexes that ushered in castration anxiety for the boy, and the traumatic realisation of her lack for a girl (Freud, 1925). In the papers he wrote later, he described femininity as a “riddle”, and how a woman was not born feminine, but somehow “comes into being”, developing “out of a child with a bisexual disposition” who has to learn to inhibit her aggressive impulses and adapt herself to the ‘receptive’ and ‘passive’ social roles for which she is destined (Freud 1933 pp. 116-118). Figlio quotes Karen Horney in particular, who argued strongly against Freud's claim that the girl was ignorant of her