Man to Man: Reconsidering Who or What Men are—and Why it Matters

Abstract

Since Freud, analysts often assume that the consultation room stages a drama between two personages: the patient and the therapist. Recently, some critics contend that race, class, age, etc. always mark these two figures. I consider the clinical implications of theorizing therapist and patient as men. I ask: What assumptions about men inform the treatment room and what are its clinical implications? I argue that in American psychoanalysis men are often understood through the lens of a narrow concept of phallicism—-one associated with emotional containment, self-sufficiency, and a drive to dominate. Such views flatten men’s experience and have far-reaching clinical implications: Some of men’s chief psychic struggles and forms of suffering go unrecognized in the consultation room. Sketching a revised view of phallicism, I offer a nuanced, layered view of men, underscoring their precarious and anxious state even as they claim a privileged status.