Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Men are traditionally represented as being loud and aggressive - but what of men's silences? This book represents a political attempt to break out of the narrow parameters of men's sexual politics, and is an attempt to provide a psychoanalytic and theoretical account of male subjectivity.

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CHOICE Review

Rutherford was a member of a left-wing British group of profeminist men in the 1970s, who called themselves Men Against Sexism. This loosely organized collection of mostly heterosexual, pro-Marxist males found themselves adrift after the cultural changes of the '80s and '90s. Many entered psychotherapy to find themselves. Rutherford wrote this book to try to explain the early life experiences of boys that imprint on them the kind of inarticulate fear of intimacy common among adult males in Europe and America. He chose the rather ambiguous abstractions of Lacanian and object-relations psychoanalysts for that task, and this book is mostly an exploration of the minutiae of various theorists (Klein, Chodorow, etc.) of that school of thought. Rutherford concludes that various pre-Oedipal and Oedipal mechanisms involving the mother and father produce the modal male personality. Primarily intended for psychoanalysts, residents in psychiatry, and graduate students in clinical psychology. R. W. Smith; California State University, Northridge