New Books In Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud, has been, albeit perhaps implicitly, a theory of masculinity. Freud’s Oedipus Complex, for example, charts the development of masculine identity in the boy while leaving the girl’s pathway to femininity less fully explicated. And let yourself recall that Freud’s immortal question was not “what do men want” was it? Nevertheless, according to Donald Moss, contemporary psychoanalysis has many glaring blind spots when it comes to thinking about men. Part of what Moss addresses in this interview is the experience of being a male analyst looking at and listening to men. He argues that this kind of male-male analytic pairing has ended up somehow sidelined and so remains under-thought and under-theorized by analysts. His book is an attempt to open an apparently tightly shut if not hidden door, (think “The Cask of Amontillado”) in the hopes of both shedding light and broadening our conceptual frameworks for thinking about manhood, masculinity and maleness. Moss draws our attenti