You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The past five decades have witnessed a revolutionary revision of the psychoanalytic—and, indeed, the popular—understanding of female psychological development, leading to both a reconsideration of gender roles in modern society and substantial changes in clinical approaches to female patients in analysis and psychotherapy. It is the contention of Ken Corbett that a similar reassessment of masculine development has long been overdue, and in this thoughtful, clinically founded book he proceeds to offer one. Corbett describes himself as an “openly gay” psychoanalyst, and it is clearly from this perspective, strongly influenced by interpersonal/relational theory, that he views what he sees as variations in patterns of masculine psychology as evinced in the behaviors of boys and men he has worked with in an extensive clinical career.
Corbett is at pains to distinguish the “normative” mode of masculinity, as it conforms to cultural expectations and psychoanalytic tradition, from “variants” that he sees as equally adaptive. Thus, as seems inevitable in such revisionist efforts, he begins his argument with a close-reading reassessment of Freud's case of Little Hans.1 Like others who have undertaken this task, he pays tribute to Freud's ingenuity, but takes exception to his unifocal attention to Hans's concerns about the intactness of his “widdler” and his oedipal conflicts—to the neglect of the severe turmoil in his family and the depth of his mother's depression as contributing factors, if not determining ones, to his anxiety.
It is, Corbett, maintains, Freud's construction of masculinity as derived from oedipal fantasy, castration anxiety, and defensive identification with the father (and disidentification from the mother) that has been the template for the traditional and still-current psychoanalytic view of “normative” male development. He notes:
The failure to include consideration of the intimate family surround is to leave Hans an oddly romanticized boy, one who is untr