New images of masculinity in Robert Bly's Iron John (1990/1991) are explored using versions of discourse analysis and psychoanalytic theory. Different discursively constructed forms of masculinity also reproduce forms of psychoanalytic knowledge (in this case Reichian and Habermasian forms), and the task of the analysis is to demonstrate how that knowledge is structured. The 'Wild Man' is the eruption into the body politic of a new version of psychoanalytic subjectivity. The analysis focuses on the meeting-point between discourses which supply surfaces of emergence for different models of the individual and experiential dynamics which are organized into different subjective configurations in and against language. This meeting-point is analytically decomposed into a series of 'discursive complexes'. Discursive complexes are both systems of statements (discourses) and psychoanalytic themes. This type of analysis is concerned in general with the workings of ideology, and in this particular case with authoritarianism. The ideological context is explored (through complexes of distortion, separation and castration) in order to understand the ways in which the social shapes and meanings of masculine authority are being transformed and reproduced.
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