Masculinity and its Vicissitudes: Reflections on Some Gaps in the Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Identity Formation

“The text, however, as we possess it to-day, will tell us enough about its own vicissitudes. Two mutually opposed treatments have left their traces on it. On the one hand it has been subjected to revisions which have falsified it in the sense of their secret aims, have mutilated and amplified it and have even changed it into its reverse; on the other hand a solicitous piety has presided over it and has sought to preserve everything as it was, no matter whether it was consistent or contradicted itself. Thus almost everywhere noticeable gaps, disturbing repetitions and obvious contradictions have come about-indications which reveal things to us which it was not intended to communicate.

While Freud's theories on female identity have been the topic of endless debate, no such controversy has arisen in regard to his ideas on male identity. This is a suspiciously odd fact, especially when it becomes recognized that the categories “masculine” and “feminine” developed in Freud's thought in a kind of dynamic opposition to one another. If Freud's theories on female development reveal a certain lack, as is currently considered to be the case in even the most orthodox of psychoanalytic circles, would it not logically follow that his theories on male development may divulge different, yet equally problematic inadequacies? Or, rather, might we view the contradictions and gaps in Freud's theory of gender and sexual identity formation as concealing certain truths about masculinity and femininity-truths regarding psychologically and historically specific structures that might themselves be accessible to the revealing skepticism of