ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how males, like females, have an early experience in relation to the nursing mother of being receptive to bodily and psychic penetration. Within the reciprocal engagement of maternal eroticism, male (as well as female) infants can enjoy the stimulating experience of being penetrated. The mother, in penetrating, is erotically active in a manner that is culturally deemed masculine and phallic. Males can tend to lose access to any registering of this lived experience within the maternal erotic matrix and may come to fear penetration as a threat to a masculine sense of self felt to be dependent upon an impermeable psychic boundary. Phallicism as a fortress of emotional self-sufficiency can become the foundation of a subjective sense of masculinity that both shapes and limits men’s desire and their access to their fullest creative and erotic potential. Two clinical vignettes are presented that illustrate anxieties in adult men about having their inner emotional life penetrated—both in relation to their wives and to their analyst within the analytic field—as the pull of maternal eroticism threatens.
