Commentary on “On Intimacy Between Men”

From the time he first enunciated it, Freud's conception of women's gender development has been subject to vigorous criticism. No comparable reexamination has been addressed to his conception of gender development in men. Yet, since masculinity and femininity are regularly found to be coordinate developments, it is likely that if Freud's conceptions of women's development are seriously flawed, his views of gender development in men have coordinate difficulties. Here Kaftal's paper makes a significant contribution.

Kaftal suggests that Freud's work, taken as a whole, is a meditation on what it is to be a man. He argues that Freud's images of manhood are consistently military and heroic, embodied in such figures as Kronos, Oedipus, Narcissus, Faust, and Moses. They are images of the brave, isolated human mind, dependent on reason alone for guidance through the thickets of biological irrationality and rapacity. A man's life story, in Freud's view, turns on decisive individual confrontation with the other in which manhood and death are inextricably bound together.

Kaftal, however, argues that although Freud was very clear about the dynamics that contribute to this heroic subtext, he was unable satisfactorily to elaborate the dynamics of men's tender relations to one another. He did speak of the boy's early special relation to his father in which he takes the father as his ideal. But that relationship did not enter into his conception of the oedipal crisis or of the identifications with the father and the consolidation of the superego in which it is resolved. Individuality remained central. Health was equated with the primacy of reason and the mastery of emotion. Group thought, or interchange among men, was more emotional and so more primitive, a residue of men's animal heritage.

Kaftal's contribution brings men's relational and affective development to the fore. He suggests that in the preoedipal period a boy optimally establishes a relationship with is father