Fathers Don't Cry: On Gender, Kinship, and the Death Drive.

A while ago, I was asked whether psychoanalysis had anything special to say about tears. Thinking through this question, it became clear to me that we cannot think about tears in psychoanalysis without thinking about gender—more specifically, the particular view of gender that psychoanalysis has been built upon, and for the most part retains, because this particular view solves for psychoanalysis some basic problems that it does not have the conceptual repertoire to address. This article goes on a journey through the story of boys, Samson from the Hebrew bible, a young New York boy who falls of his bike, Freud's three sons and his theoretically adoptive son Karl Abraham, and one of my patients. It is a journey through the civilization-long prohibition on parents and boys to attach, a prohibition that I argue serves the arch-value of sacrifice by which patriarchy is driven. I also trace in this journey the story of the controversial and powerful analytic concept of the death drive. And I argue that this concept, born during and after World War I, bears the mark of the frightened, homo-attachment-phobic impulse that has taken over a psychoanalysis unable to cope with the madness of a world war without blaming the victim. I offer toward the end a glimpse of an alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]