Mariam Alizade - Masculine Scenarios

COWAP, the Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis of the International Psychoanalytical Association, is both pleased and proud to present the third volume of this series of books, which provide a forum for discussion of issues involving sexuality, sexual identity, and gender constructs in a cross-cultural and international context.

The remit of the Committee is to investigate sexuality, interactions, and relationships between men and women. With this in mind, Masculine Scenarios aims to offer the reader a wide range of topics with their implications for the world of psychoanalysis. Masculine Scenarios discusses different issues involving object relations and their vicissitudes as regards the psychic world of men and male sexuality in general.

This book is intended to be open-minded and free-ranging in spirit. In putting forward their ideas, the authors hope that they will lead to fresh thinking and new hypotheses that stimulate the cross-cultural interplay of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic ideas.

The contributors were selected on a basis that combined both chance and known professional skill, with the idea of theoretical pluralism uppermost in our minds, even though we realized that this would probably result in controversy.

The reader will find not only papers from different essentialist, constructivist, and culture-based standpoints, but will also note the existence of theoretical and clinical intersections where psychoanalysis borders on closely-related disciplines, such as philosophy, sociology, history, ethology, etc.

The biology that Nature bestows on each of us at birth, in its innocence and originality, provides the stage where human scenarios unfold. It is on this basis that the development of somatic, psychic, and socio-cultural integration is analyzed on various levels.

The body, that strange governor of our fate, gives expression to the voices inhabiting it. The inner discourse is that of our first significant others, with their trans-generational mandates and identificatory patterns. They speak to us through traumatic experiences and sexual feelings.

Historically, sexuality, as viewed by psychoanalysis, is wide-ranging and encompasses heterogeneous forms that involve subjectivity, scenarios recorded in the psychic flesh, and inevitable psycho-physical and cultural events.

In this series, classical areas of psychoanalysis are conjugated with postmodern questions and with new hypotheses to form a kind of heterogeneous, pluralistic spectrum defined to some extent by time and influenced by social factors that participate in the genesis and development of psychodynamics. The controversial concept of gender calls into question our established theories on sexuality and forces us to listen with an open mind to issues involving sexual identity and choice of sexual object.

This volume will enable the reader to venture on a stimulating journey into psychoanalytic terminology, cultural definitions, certainties, doubts, and hegemonies of all kinds. They oblige us to think and to think again about the complexity of sexuality in the light of psychoanalysis. Human identity, sexual identity, primary and secondary identification, object choice, narcissismall of these lie on a continuum with homosexuality, transsexualism, transvestism, heterosexuality, and asexuality. Concepts on sexuality and gender are outlined anew in an interplay of theoretical and clinical networks, with the aim of increasing the efficiency of analytic praxis freed from prejudice and monolithic convention.

The hope of the Committee is that these papers will encourage future volumes with the aim of opening up further pathways into psychoanalytic exploration.

Alcira Mariam Alizade

Chairperson,

Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis of the

International Psychoanalytical Association.