cover image The Man Who Never Was: Freudian Tales of Women and Their Men

The Man Who Never Was: Freudian Tales of Women and Their Men

Janet Sayers. Basic Books, $24 (236pp) ISBN 978-0-465-04557-0

Our unwarranted, inflated images of men--as all-powerful patriarchs, phalluses incarnate, monsters or idols--damage women and men alike, maintains British psychotherapist Sayers. In 15 lively psychoanalytic case histories, she explores how distorted notions of masculinity carry over into adult defense mechanisms of denial, mania and obsessive control. Some patients fear the strength the father represents, like Tessa, who treats her small son's father as a nonentity and barricades herself and the boy in their house to fend off potential male intruders. Another patient, Celia, having been brutally beaten as a girl by her father and whose mother stole her boyfriends, develops Oedipal fixations on a series of abusive lovers. Several case histories feature men who act out the male stereotypes of Don Juan, wimp, tough guy, con man and pervert. In a wise and liberating book, Sayers tempers Freud's male-centered theories with the mother-centered insights of Vienna-born British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and with a feminist awareness of patriarchy's social, sexual and power imbalances. (Aug.)