Psychoanalysis Science and Masculinity (Paperback)

This book argues that the need to know in Western culture is expressed by the relentless drive of science to get to the source of all phenomena. However, the profound reach into the interior of nature is accompanied by primitive unconscious phantasies of mastery, of knowing as making, of masculine intrusion into nature's creativity, and of nature's retaliation and deterioration. Science becomes a tool of domination and a suspect magical enterprise. Benign nature becomes ominous and depleted.
As a result, the need to know becomes a moral quest in which science unconsciously researches into the internal world of our intentions, externalized into the world of the phenomena that it investigates. The book also argues that the masculine domination of nature is typically understood as phallic mastery, but has roots in a phantasy mediated by semen, in which the male identifies with and replicates the sources of life.
These themes are addressed in a Kleinian psychoanalytic framework using clinical, mythological, anthropological, and historical material.