Conference: The Fragile Phallus (warning: postmodern trash)

The latest string of sexual assault and harassment scandals invites critical reflection into the structure of masculinity.

While much of the media focus has been on abuses of power, popular responses such as the #MeToo movement have emphasised the everydayness of sexual harassment, shifting the focus to masculinity as such.

Psychoanalysis has long held that masculinity is not a biological given, nor is it simply the sum total of patriarchal values operating on an individual. Rather, it is characterised by a peculiar, fraught and anxious relation to the psychical emblem known as ‘the phallus’.

How might psychoanalysis enrich popular notions of ‘fragile’ and ‘toxic’ masculinity?

This conference brings together perspectives from psychoanalysis and beyond to bring out some of these troubling (and troubled) dimensions of the subjective structure popularly known as ‘masculinity’.

Speakers & Titles

Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz
From Machismo to Medusa: The Question of Masculinity and Maternal Omnipotence

Calum Neill
The Only Good Father

Dany Nobus
Performing Psychoanalysis: Arrectness, Decubitus and the Vicissitudes of Phallic Space

Jordan Osserman
Is the Phallus Uncut? On Male Circumcision and ‘Intactivism’

Renata Salecl
The Fear of Being Ignored: From Incel to Imposters

Ivan Ward
The Tory Power Stance: A Developmental Perspective

Abstracts

Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz
From Machismo to Medusa: The Question of Masculinity and Maternal Omnipotence
This paper looks for the roots of masculinity in maternal omnipotence and in the mirage of wholeness and plenitude of primary narcissism. A bit of a reaction formation, masculinity could be read as the construct erected against the tyranny of the phallic mother, an attempt to appropriate her murderous power. But the horror of castration persists all the same and the hollow phallus of masculinity ultimately is its best poster boy. Masculinity and maternal omnipotence will be examined across a variety of cultural and mythological references and an array of clinical situations including fetishism, hysteria and psychosis.

Calum Neill
The Only Good Father
Abstract TBA

Dany Nobus
Performing Psychoanalysis: Arrectness, Decubitus and the Vicissitudes of Phallic Space
Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s distinction between phallic (masculine) and uterine (feminine) space, I shall argue in this paper that the spatial arrangements in which a psychoanalytic process unfolds, and which have hardly changed over the past 130 years, not only establish a necessary power relationship between the analyst and the analysand, but also constitute the physical reflection of a problematic dialectic within the latter’s psychic space. The reconstruction of this dialectic towards a certain resolution (sublation) is conditioned by a process of de-phallicisation, whereby the transfiguration of psychic space is equally reflected in the re-arrangement of the physical space.

Jordan Osserman
Is the Phallus Uncut? On Male Circumcision and ‘Intactivism’

Female circumcision (also known as ‘FGM’) has been debated and opposed by feminists, policymakers, and the public at large for a long time. More recently, a movement opposed to male circumcision, which goes under the banner of ‘intactivism’, has been gathering steam. Based initially in the United States, many intactivists are men who were circumcised at birth and now attribute a range of psychological and sexual ailments to the procedure. They often portray themselves as victims of feminist ideology, aligning themselves with the ‘men’s rights movement’. Some attempt ‘foreskin restoration’ to retrieve, or regrow, the part of their penis they feel to have traumatically lost.
The term ‘intactivist’ invites psychoanalytic criticism, as it references that wish for ‘intactness’ that psychoanalysis alleges to be a defensive fantasy against the subject’s foundational fracture — the wish to ‘restore’ a prelapsarian wholeness that never actually existed. How can psychoanalysis help us understand the psychical dimensions of such stances on male circumcision? And what might the seemingly fringe concerns of intactivists reveal about the nature of masculinity as such?

Renata Salecl
The Fear of Being Ignored: From Incel to Imposters
This lecture will address the question of masculinity in light of neoliberal ideology of success and failure. First, it will question why it seems to be harder for men to deal with sexual rejection and lack of social recognition. And second, it will look at violence against women in the context of the neoliberal ideals of masculinity.

Ivan Ward
The Tory Power Stance: A Developmental Perspective
Whether adopted by a man or woman, the ‘Tory Power Stance’, as it has been dubbed, is a pose designed to project masculine power and authority. Various hypotheses have been offered as to the origin of the pose and what it might signify. In this paper I will offer an alternative view.

Organised by the Freud Museum in partnership with South Hampstead High School.

https://www.freud.org.uk/event/the-fragile-phallus/