Book Overview

This book presents a wide range of psychoanalytic writing on masculinity and femininity from British, European, and North and South American perspectives, exploring how masculine and feminine aspects are structured and evolve in the child, adolescent and adult. The authors address from a background of considerable clinical experience how masculinity and femininity manifest in the body, gender, sex, sexuality and the life-cycle, and cover aspects both productive and generative, constricted and defended.

The importance of the parenting couple and their bond with the child in the forming of masculine and feminine identities is emphasized. Beginning with an overview of the development of masculinity, the developmental perspective is explored in how adolescents discover their sexuality and come to own their sexual bodies. Different types of disturbance are explored including the early defence mechanism of disavowal of difference.