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 idenitities 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.

Introduction , Evolving perspectives on masculinity and its discontents: reworking the internal phallic and genital positions , Discussion of "Evolving perspectives on masculinity and its discontents: reworking the internal phallic and genital positions" , The hour of the stranger , Discussion of "The hour of the stranger" , The abyss of intimacy , Lack of discrimination as a defence mechanism , Listening to psychical bisexuality in analysis , Masculinity and the analytic relationship-transforming masculinity in the course of the analysis , Intersubjective context of gender and sexuality , Identity: a constellation of emotional experience and metaphors in childhood , Furious with love-some reflections on the sexuality of a little girl*