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The paper “Unlawful Entry: Male Fears of Psychic Penetration” is discussed. The paper's author, Dianne Elise, argues that the key to masculine development in contemporary Western culture is the imperative to penetrate and not to be penetrated. Therefore, penetration of either the body or the mind becomes a threat to the stability of many men. Men begin life with an experience of passive excitement—they are penetrated in the nursing situation. Elise argues that subsequent developmental experience forecloses the capacity for penetration and, with it, for emotional capacity. She suggests that men who have great difficulty allowing emotional access should be considered to be suffering from the “citadel complex.”
In this commentary, it is argued that Elise confounds the metaphor and the actuality of penetration. Furthermore, she adopts a rhetorical position that creates a meta-message. She adopts a scientific voice to describe masculine development in concrete, positivist terms. This choice of stance undercuts her stated intention to question traditional psychoanalytic gender stereotypy. Although she advocates emotional openness to penetration, she establishes herself and by extension the analyst as an all-knowing, impenetrable authority.
For those that have the strictest searchers been, Find women are but men turned outside in.