Heterosexual Masculinities in Clinical Practice

Robert Grossmark, Ph.D.

4.0 NASW*/APA** CEU Credits

Men are different now. What to a previous generation would have appeared as pathological or defensive we encounter now as forms of masculine subjectivity that include wishes for intimacy, receptivity and surrender alongside ambition and the pleasures of phallic narcissism. Likewise, contemporary psychoanalysis has advanced beyond its classical biases into a postmodern world of constructed, emergent and multiple selves, identities and gendered possibilities. This workshop aims to bring this critical and generative thinking to the world of heterosexual masculinity and ask how clinical practice is enriched by considering masculinity as “a sex that is not one”.

Building on 30 years of queer and feminist theory this presentation will expand our understanding of masculinity accordingly and reposition heterosexual masculinity within the larger field of gendered subjectivities, appreciating all the “essential contradictions”, complexities and multiplicities of the heterosexual masculine position. A masculinity will be described that is not based on the repudiation of the feminine and is not reduced to its social functions, but rather is contextual, subjective and emotionally open.

Psychoanalysis has always been about the interior life of an individual and its revelation in the clinical dyad. In this workshop we will consider the interior life of men anew and we will examine how this emerges in treatment via theoretical overview, detailed clinical examples and case discussions.

Robert Grossmark, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in New York City. He is the co-editor of Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory published by the Analytic Press. He is faculty at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies Training Program in Adult Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, adjunct faculty in the Doctoral Program in Clinical psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, faculty in the sub-specialty program in Group Psychoanalysis at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Dr. Grossmark is also a clinical supervisor in the Training Program in Adult Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, the doctoral programs in Clinical Psychology at Yeshiva University and the Graduate School of the City University of New York.

www.nipinst.org

CEU's will be distributed at the end of the event, upon the completion of a brief workshop evaluation.

*This program has been approved for 4.0 hours of continuing education under the auspices of the National Association of Social Work.

** The National Institute for the Psychotherapies Training Institute (NIPTI) is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. NIPTI maintains responsibility for this program and its contents.