Masculine Scenarios by Mariam Alizade

Author:Mariam Alizade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Karnac Books
Published: 2011-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

Clinical implications

In a homophobic and heterosexist culture, the experiences of shame and narcissistic vulnerability are core to the lives of men who offend gender through their expression of same-sex desire. It is only recently that psychoanalytic theory and practice have begun to appreciate the powerful impact of the social context on the psychic experience of gay men. (For examples of analytic work conducted from this perspective, see Frommer, 1994; Blum & Pfetzing, 1997; and Drescher, 1998.)

Gay men need support in becoming more comfortable with their own non-normative versions of masculinity that incorporate same-sex desire. Our task as analysts is not to maintain the norm, but to broaden the scope of masculinities gay and straight men can wear with a feeling of pride and pluck about themselves. We need to make room for multiple narratives about how boys grow into men—narratives that capture the diversity of human experience-without privileging some stories and stigmatizing others (see Corbett, 1996, for example).

The most productive arena for reworking issues of gender, sexuality, and shame is the ongoing relational life of the psychoanalytic dyad. However, we as therapists must analyse how we have used gender to organize our internal experience and structure our relationships (Goldner, 1991) and how the binaries of gender and sexuality intersect in our particular psyches to form prescriptive relationships between the two.

The analyst’s capacity to work with his or her personal response to the patient’s homoerotic desire is crucial to treatment outcome. Whether a mutual collusion will occur to avoid the patient’s underlying shame, or whether the analyst will find the patient’s shaming self and bring it into the relationship, is a central crossroads in the treatment. It is the analyst’s subjectivity, often rationalized by commitments to a psychoanalytic theory that reifies the opposition between identification and desire, that determines the course of treatment (see Frommer, 1995).

As analysts, we need actively to question and challenge our patients as well as ourselves when the experience of human attributes becomes cast in our minds as exclusively masculine or exclusively feminine (Layton, 1998). A critical analytic stance can help us to counter the excessive reliance on binary thinking that characterizes so much of human thought and is so pervasive in both cultural and psychoanalytic discourse. We need both to recognize and to keep in mind that categories like masculine-feminine and gay-straight are actually culturally sanctioned instances of splitting (Benjamin, 1988; Dimen, 1991; Goldner, 1991; Layton, 1998). Holding the psychic tension between the knowledge that gender and sexuality are socially constructed and yet lived as psychic realities can create a transitional space in which to experience them (Dimen, 1991).

From this perspective, we can free sexuality from the hegemony of gender. We can begin to conceive of erotic experience as hinging less on the hollow concept of sexual orientation and more on a dynamic interplay of contradictory identifications and complementarities. Simply put, the mystery of desire rests on who we allow ourselves to be and what we allow ourselves to want.

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