When is a man a man? Male identity between narcissism and object-love

When is a man a man? Male identity between narcissism and object-love. - The article describes a number of key aspects of male identity formation with special reference to body-near mental representations. The author traces the line of development from childhood to high old age. The decisive feature is genital symbolism and the way in which the penis is conceptualized as a weapon and/or creative instrument. Here the integration of aggressive subjective experience into sexual identity and the modulation of that experience play an essential role. Different manifestations of this development are set off against one another as phallic vs. genital masculinity and explained with recourse to a case history.