In recent years there have been substantial changes in approaches to how genders are made and what functions genders fulfill. Most of the scholarly focus in this area has been in the areas of feminist, gay, and lesbian studies, and heterosexual masculinity - which tended to be defined by lack and absence - has not received the critical and scholarly attention these other areas have received. Heterosexual Masculinities rethinks a psychoanalytic tradition that has long thought of masculinity as a sort of brittle defense against femininity, softness, and emotionality. Reflecting current trends in psychoanalytic thinking, this book seeks to understand heterosexual masculinity as fluid, multiple, and emergent. The contributors to this insightful volume take new perspectives on relations between men, men’s positions as fathers in relation to their sons and daughters, the clinical encounter with heterosexual men, the social contexts of masculinity, and the multiplicity of heterosexual masculine subjectivities. What to a previous generation would have appeared as pathological or defensive, we now encounter as forms of masculine subjectivity that include wishes for intimacy, receptivity, and surrender, alongside ambition and the pleasures of "phallic narcissism."--Publisher description.

Masculinities, plural / Ethel Spector Person -- Masculinity and its discontents : making room for the "mother" inside the male : an essential achievement for the healthy male gender identity / Michael J. Diamond -- Names of the father / Bruce Reis -- Two men talking : the emergence of multiple masculinities in psychoanalytic treatment / Robert Grossmark -- Imperfect love, imperfect lives : making love, making sex, making moral judgments / Irwin Hirsch -- On intimacy between men / Emmanuel Kaftal -- An eruption of erotic vitality between a male analyst and a male patient / William F. Cornell -- David and Jonathan / Eyal Rozmarin -- Psychotherapy with poor African-American men : challenges around the construction of masculinities / C. Jama Adams -- "Fathers" and "daughters" / Adrienne Harris -- Finding a father : repetition, difference, and fantasy in finding Nemo / Louis Rothschild -- Interiority and inner genital space in men : what else can be lost in castration? / Gerald I. Fogel.