The elusiveness of masculinity: primordial vulnerability, lack, and the challenges of male development

On Not Having it All: Exploring the Fetishization of Trans Women by Heterosexual Men

The appeal of transgender pornography, especially involving "pre-op"(erative) trans women, has steadily increased placing it in the top six most searched categories. In this paper I explore one unconscious function of the "pre-op" trans woman sexual fantasy that I have observed in some young heterosexual gynandromorphophilic men (i.e., men sexually drawn to the MtF "pre-op" body) who use transgender pornography and/or escorts. In contrast to a psychoanalytic reading of gynandromorphophilia in which the "pre-op" trans woman's body is understood to be "missing nothing" because she has breasts and a penis, I suggest that what is psychically compelling and sexually arousing for some men is quite the opposite: because the "pre-op" trans woman has a penis, she therefore has no vagina/womb. It is the triumph over what is missing and that should be there. The penis in lieu of the vagina/womb is evidence of her damaged procreative potential. In these cases, I propose that the sexual preference exposes the man's underlying womb envy. The "pre-op" trans woman is projectively identified with a felt-to-be "infertile" part of the man. The phantasized damaged woman's procreative body temporarily relieves the man of his sense of inadequacy and anxieties about his capacity to create and enliven. I illustrate this dynamic with clinical examples.

The Innate Capacity for Representing Subjective Experience: The Infant's Mind is Neither Primitive nor Prerepresentational

The author cites the prominence of theories that locate serious adult psychopathology in the preverbal infant's inability to formulate or represent traumatic experience. The work of two such authors, H. Levine and D. B. Stern, is briefly considered. The frame of reference for this investigation is that clinical and academic research findings are highly relevant to psychoanalytic theorizing. It is argued that when such findings are considered, a view of the infant with "primordial and unrepresented" states of mind has little evidence to support it. In fact, research findings summarized herein point to an opposite view: that of the "competent infant," one with highly accurate perceptual discrimination capacities and an innate ability to register and represent subjective experience in both procedural and declarative memory, even prenatally. Given the infant's competencies, it seems implausible to hold that representational deficits are at the heart of serious adult psychopathology, which is instead seen to be the result of defensive maneuvers against unknowable and unspeakable truth rather than the absence of a preverbal representational capacity. Current research findings seem to pose a significant challenge for psychoanalytic theories that espouse "primitive mental states"; "unrepresented," "unformulated," or "unsymbolized" experience; or "nonconscious" states.

THE FATHER AND THE PATERNAL FUNCTION IN THE PSYCHOANALYTICAL PROCESS: THEORETICAL AND CLINICAL ISSUES

The author addresses the essential aspects regarding the definition of the paternal function in metapsychological terms: how it forms and develops in the mental world, which functions it serves, or could come to serve, in the dynamic of mental functioning, and lastly, the consequent clinical implications, in particular the formation and development of symbolic capacity. In the second part, using two clinical vignettes and a clinical case, the author attempts to discuss its link to the theme of masculinity, suggesting a brief reflection on the challenges presented to the specificities of the analytical clinic.

THE MISSING FATHER FUNCTION IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY AND TECHNIQUE: THE ANALYST'S INTERNAL COUPLE AND MATURING INTIMACY

This paper argues that recovering the "missing" paternal function in analytic space is essential for the patient's achievement of mature object relations. Emerging from the helpless infant's contact with primary caregivers, mature intimacy rests on establishing healthy triadic functioning based on an infant-with-mother-and-father. Despite a maternocentric bias in contemporary clinical theory, the emergence of triangularity and the inclusion of the paternal third as a separating element is vital in the analytic dyad. Effective technique requires the analyst's balanced interplay between the paternal, investigative and the maternal, maximally receptive modes of functioning-the good enough analytic couple within the analyst-to serve as the separating element that procreatively fertilizes the capacity for intimacy with a differentiated other. A clinical example illustrates how treatment is limited when the paternal function is minimized within more collusive, unconsciously symbiotic dyads.

RECOVERING THE FATHER IN MIND AND FLESH: HISTORY, TRIADIC FUNCTIONING, AND DEVELOPMENTAL IMPLICATIONS

This paper aims to restore the father and paternal function to their rightful place alongside the mother and maternity in order to counter the prevailing matricentric, dyadic bias in psychoanalytic theory and technique. The author contends that both the symbolic and the actual, flesh-and-blood father are necessary to optimize his child's development. The paternal function inevitably operates in a triadic matrix; thirdness is always psychically in existence-with the father ever present in the mother's unconscious mind-and the paternal third is necessary to open up symbolic space. As an embodied other, the actual father, both as a separating agent and an attracting object, is called upon to recognize his child's otherness throughout the inescapable father-child rivalries, neglect, and desire.