title: The elusiveness of masculinity: primordial vulnerability, lack, and the challenges of male development.
abstract: Reaching beyond the Oedipus prototype to address the unrepresentable vulnerability founded on the boy's infantile helplessness in contact with the mother's body, the author aims to identify the inherent tensions and enigmas of being male. He proposes that both the repudiation of femininity and the overvaluation of phallicity are unconsciously constructed to withstand the fundamental deficiency grounded in the asymmetry of the boy's prephallic relation with his primary object. This bodily based primordial vulnerability, marked by absence and lack, remains elusive-an unsymbolizable experience that provides the archaic matrix for adaptive and defensive phallicism, the oedipal complex, and genital progression. A clinical vignette is presented to illustrate these concepts.
authors.affiliation: Training and Supervising Analyst at Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, Los Angeles, California.
authors.forename: Michael J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Diamond
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D057228:Masculinity; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory
keywords: Masculinity; dyadic and triadic reality; homoerotic love for father; infantile helplessness; inner genital; lack; male gender identity; paternal function; phallicity; prephallic phase; primordial vulnerability; psychic bisexuality; receptivity/activity