ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between masculinity and violence by introducing a description of a young schizophrenic man presented by the psychoanalyst Herbert Rosenfeld in his paper on depression in a schizophrenic. It is a fundamental part of this study that anxieties about masculinity interacted with anxieties about the dissolution of the ego, and anxieties about the demise of a whole culture and led to the creation of fascism as a particularly masculine ideology. Consider Oedipus in front of the Sphinx. He has already killed his father at the crossroads and he is now in confrontation with the big primordial monster/mother-the Sphinx. Perelberg's dichotomy of the 'murdered father' and the 'symbolic dead father' creates a division between concrete, psychotic thinking and symbolic thinking. The destruction of symbolic thinking goes together with the 'destruction of the contents of the mind' which Bollas sees as part of the 'fascist state of mind'.
