ABSTRACT
The phallic masculine project represents an antithesis to the essence of care. This chapter focuses on nurturing, whose beginnings are to be found in an intersubjective relation that is inherently characterized by helplessness and dependence. Masculinity attracts here as a possibility, but one that will not be realized since the phallic, masculine project essentially can be said to be about transcending fundamental existential conditions: to ignore helplessness, transience and dependence implies a rejection of the motherly containment. It is, of course, a great challenge not only for the boy/the man but for each one of us to relate to these fundamental existential conditions, and the point is that the masculine project represents one of these ways of relating. This discussion of motherly containing and nurturing is related to an existential and phenomenological examination of masculinity from the point of view of the dual concepts of immanence and transcendence, both of which are used in phenomenological writing but have not gained any traction in psychoanalysis. Instead of dichotomizing the concepts of immanence and transcendence, it is imperative to find a mutual and dynamic balance between them. However, as regards phallic masculinity, they are quite incompatible; only transcendence possesses any prestige, because it surpasses what is given and present by constructing something new, whilst values, associated with immanence such as preserving and accepting what already exists, are rejected in phallic masculinity.
