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What is a boy? And what does it mean to have a boyhood in 2010? Does a boy grow psychologically by separating from his mother or by identifying with his father? In his recent book, Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities, Ken Corbett tackles these questions. As stated, his premise is that “No two boys, no two boyhoods are the same” (p. 3).
Corbett's Boyhoods essentially comprises an anthology of his psychoanalytic essays written between 2001 and 2009. The essays develop his progressive theoretical psychoanalysis of boyhoods and an evolving, multifaceted conception of gender. In the final chapter, “Fantastic Phallicism: Recognition, Relation, and Phallic Narcissism,” Corbett adds some provocative concepts to his body of work.
Corbett sets out to “capture the lives of boys, in particular the movement, the friendships, and the multiple eroticism that informs boys' lives” (p. 2). Boys, he contends, “collect as a pattern—as Walt Whitman might have it, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme” (p. 3). In his view, “a kind of ‘Phallophobia’ has crept into our cultural theorizing” (p. 218), with the male body and the positive valence of phallic aggression disavowed (p. 219). He challenges us to speak once again of the penis, a body part completely absent these days in popular books on parenting boys. And in our clinical imagination, he says, the boy's experience of his body, and the fantastic orbit that is the boy's body, must be brought back