Reading and Living Images of Masculinity: Comments on Parker's 'Wild Men'

Abstract

Hermeneutic impulses which continue the interpretative flows around the foci indicated in Parker's 'Masculinity and Cultural Change: Wild Men' (1995) do not just flow by themselves, but open new lines for discovery. As the 'Wild Man' is understood in Parker's text as sthe eruption into the body politic of a new version of psychoanalytic subjectivity', new meanings of Reichian and Habermasian forms of psychoanalytic knowledge are explored (stressing Reich's social understanding of psychoanalysis and warning that Habermas's universalistic claims, as the core of his point of view, cannot be preserved in a feminine interpretation of his communication discourse). It is also suggested that arguments delivered in developmental psychology by Piaget and Vygotsky should be taken into account in order to examine the relationship between the internal and external world and their qualities. In spite of different cultural patterns a promotion of a common patriarchal masculine pattern is recognized in the social context of the present author, not as men's writing, but as a nationalist ideology.