Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Man: Psychoanalysis and Masculinity

177 Pages·2012·0.69 MB·English

by  Donald Moss

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Man 1
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Images and ideas associated with masculinity are forever in flux. In this book, 13
Donald Moss addresses the never-ending effort of men—regardless of sexual 14
orientation—to shape themselves in relation to the unstable notion of masculinity. 15
Part 1 looks at the lifelong labor faced by boys and men of assessing themselves 16
in relation to an always shifting, always receding, ideal of “masculinity.” In 17
Part 2, Moss considers a series of nested issues regarding homosexuality, homo- 18
phobia and psychoanalysis. Part 3 focuses on the interface between the body 19
experienced as a private entity and the body experienced as a public entity—the 20
body experienced as one’s own and the body subject to the judgments, regulations 21
and punishments of the external world. The final part looks at men and violence. 22
Men must contend with the entwined problems of regulating aggression and 23
figuring out its proper level, aiming to avoid both excess and insufficiency. This 24
section focuses on excessive aggression and its damaging consequences, both to 25
its object and to its subjects. 26
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Man will be of great interest not only to 27
psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, but also to a much wider audience of readers 28
interested in gender studies, queer studies, and masculinity 29
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Donald Moss is on the faculty of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education 31
of NYU Medical Center. Moss focuses on the elemental problem sites of 32
masculinity—mind/body, inside/outside, heterosexual/homosexual, love/hate, 33
singular/plural—while arguing against any settled notion of what men—and 34
women—want. 35
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Thirteen Ways of 1
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Looking at a Man 3
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Psychoanalysis and masculinity 12
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Donald Moss 19
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2 First published 2012
3 by Routledge
27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 2FA
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5 Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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711 Third Avenue, New York NY 10017
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Routledgeis an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
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© 2012 Donald Moss
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The right of Donald Moss to be identified as author of this work has been
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asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
11 Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
13 utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
14 known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
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from the publishers.
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
17 registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
18 without intent to infringe.
19 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
20 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
21 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Moss, Donald, 1944–
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Thirteen ways of looking at a man : psychoanalysis and masculinity /
23 Donald Moss.
24 p. cm.
1. Masculinity. 2. Men–Psychology. 3. Psychoanalysis. I. Title.
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BF175.5.M37M677 2012
26 155.3'32–dc23 2012000721
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ISBN: 978–0–415–60491–8 (hbk)
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ISBN: 978–0–415–60492–5 (pbk)
29 ISBN: 978–0–203–10599–3 (ebk)
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Typeset in Times by
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Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon
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33 [FSC logo dropped in by printer]
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For Lynne,Hannah,Ivan and Isaiah,
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and in memory of my father.
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Contents 1
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Foreword by Alan Bass viii 13
Prologue xvii 14
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1 Masculinity as masquerade 1
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2 Immaculate attachment vs passive yearning: thoughts on being 18
and becoming a man 9 19
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First aside: Ted 19
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3 On neither being nor becoming a man 22 22
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4 Two ways of looking back 41
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5 Psychoanalysis and male homosexuality/the ideal of neutrality 50 25
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6 Internalized homophobia in men: wanting in the first-person
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singular, hating in the first-person plural 63
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7 On situating homophobia 83 29
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8 Freud’s “female homosexual”: one way of looking at a woman 98
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Second aside: Little Richard 115 32
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9 Looking at a transsexual 117
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10 War stories 128 35
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Epilogue 137
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Bibliography 142 39
Index 146 40
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1 Foreword
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3 On Donald Moss’s style
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Alan Bass
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13 Like drives, cultural products place a demand on the mind for work.
14 (Donald Moss, 2010)
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17 Among American psychoanalysts writing today, Donald Moss has perhaps the
18 most distinctive voice. By voice, I mean a style that is immediately recognizable.
19 In this book, he explicitly weds his style to what he is saying about masculinity.
20 Moss wants us not only to look at men, but to look at a man, himself, writing about
21 men. He wants us to understand why he develops a certain style, and why, for
22 him, having us watch the work of this style will give greater purchase on the
23 question of what men are like. (But not, as he specifies, the question of what men
24 are.) Most particularly, he wants to focus on what men are like from a Freudian
25 point of view: the point of view of drives, body, mind, and work. In order to
26 read this book as it demands to be read, to make the point Moss himself has
27 made in the epigraph above, the reader will have to experience it as a drive
28 stimulus: a demand for work. But what is a demand for work that is inextricable
29 from a style?
30 Freud’s definition of the drives preoccupies Moss; he cites it several times, and
31 elsewhere uses it as the title of an article (Moss 2010b) (the epigraph above). It
32 opens Chapter 4, on one of the book’s central topics: homophobia. Moss wants us
33 to think of homophobia not only as prejudice, but as a symptom, and like all
34 symptoms, related to drives. Moss uses the quote again in Chapter 5, on the general
35 relation of psychoanalysis and homosexuality. He is speaking of the necessary
36 psychoanalytic search for neutrality, which always encounters what he calls a “tilt”
37 in the analyst, a drive-related experience that seems to make immediate sensuous
38 sense. He says that “the tilt I feel pulls my mind toward an alignment with demands
39 emanating from my body. The mental work demanded of me is to satisfy this
40 drive-based tilt: to provide it with theoretical cover, to adorn it with thought.”
41 Understand: the “theoretical cover,” the “adornment” is the work itself, which for
42 Moss is also the work of achieving analytic neutrality against the pull of the “tilt.”
43 In Chapter 6, “Internalized homophobia in men,” Moss pursues his examination
44 of homophobia as a symptom and writes
Foreword ix
I am conceptualizing drive here as did Freud, as ‘the demand made upon the 1
mind for work as a result of its connection to the body.’ Often, that demand 2
is experienced as same-sex desire, which, for a multitude of interdicting 3
factors, cannot be met. In such cases, homophobia and internalized 4
homophobia are likely symptomatic outcomes. 5
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To paraphrase: as a symptom, internalized homophobia works against the work 7
demanded by the drive. Extending this possibility, in Chapter 7 Moss writes of a 8
patient who finds satisfaction nowhere in his life. He again cites Freud’s definition 9
to conceptualize this man as a “slave to drive,” a slave to a work that promises no 10
satisfaction. 11
The point of these citations is to open up unexpected resources of Freud’s 12
definition of drive as work. To understand homophobia as a symptom demands a 13
certain kind of work in the analyst. Moss conceives this as the work of thinking 14
beyond the conventional understanding of self-hatred as internalization of societal 15
prejudice in order to see how such internalization can produce alienation from the 16
work of the drives. The analyst, too, is a creature of drives, and if not alienated 17
from them, will have to perform another kind of work: the work of challenging 18
what seems to make immediate, bodily, sensuous sense. In some people, alienation 19
from the drives is so radical that they can only work at ensuring that the work of 20
the drives will come to nothing. No matter how one responds, there is no escaping 21
this demand for work. 22
But there is another aspect to Moss’s insistence on the work of the drives. He is 23
asking us to attend to the ways he seeks drive satisfaction from the work of his 24
style. He treats this question in depth, and this is where the autobiographical aspect 25
of the book comes in. It is full of first-person accounts: Moss the analyst at work, 26
Moss looking at a Calvin Klein ad, Moss as a young child with polio, Moss 27
listening to his father’s war stories, Moss and his friend Ted, Moss listening to 28
Little Richard, Moss as a boy betraying his angels. And there is another kind of 29
autobiography here, the account of Moss telling us about how he writes, and why 30
he writes as he does. 31
This account is very attentive to the tensions of writing as both an individual 32
and as a member of a collective, for example, as a psychoanalyst among psycho- 33
analysts and as a man among men. Two citations on this issue: 34
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For me, the first-person singular voice elegantly—efficiently—serves to both 36
illuminate and obscure some of my relevant membership obligations and, 37
more importantly, to reveal a conundrum integral to membership itself. The 38
conundrum is illuminated the moment I begin to try to write a psychoanalytic 39
text. Write a word and I immediately feel the presence of anxiety, an awareness 40
of potential danger. Whatever I say may constitute a violation. Writing as a 41
psychoanalyst, my “I” may be excessively oppositional, my “we” potentially 42
presumptuous. 43
(p. 9) 44