Injured Men: Trauma, Healing, and the Masculine Self

Abstract

INJURED MEN: TRAUMA, HEALING, AND THE MASCULINE SELF, by Ira Brenner. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson Publishers, 2009, 241 pp. In Injured Men: Trauma, Healing, and the Masculine Self, Ira Brenner draws on his experiences as clinician and administrator to present a variety of forms of trauma and traumatic experiences that shape men's lives, including relational-, genocide-, and warbased trauma. Working from a psychodynamic perspective, Brenner uses wonderfully rich case examples to present an organized approach to the discussion of trauma and healing. He begins with an updated theory about the etiology and course of dissociative identity disorder (DID), tracing its trajectory from childhood trauma, and identifying dissociation as the preferred defense across the lifespan from infant attachment through adulthood. Adding to the work of Winnicott, Mahler, Kohut, and Stern, Brenner offers a dimensional and relational construction of the disorder, characterized by impaired object- and self-constancy. He describes how an individual's impaired self- and object-constancy couple with the tendency to dissociate when faced with trauma, perpetuating states of awareness and unawareness, presence and absence, and being "me and not me" (p. 29). Brenner begins this discussion of DID from a most intriguing angle, focusing first on cases of female patients who developed male "alters" as protective mechanisms. In these discussions, Brenner explains the tendency of the male alters to seek self-protection by eschewing anything feminine, linking this phenomenon to what many have described as part of "normative" male development. His choice to begin the DID discussion around the development of male alters in women provides excellent opportunity for commentary about cultural notions of men as protectors of women, and a heuristic for exploring cross-gender commonalities in psychological development. At various turns throughout the text, Brenner provides additional insights into the masculine self by framing clients' worldview within traditionally "male" values and discussing traditional male occupations. The text is laced with a number of engaging topics, including annotated sessions with a Vietnam veteran, the impact of September 11 on work with traumatic experiences, the delicacy involved with termination, and outcomes of patients reading their own case reports. Brenner strikes perhaps his strongest note in chapter 5 (A Time Traveling Man), in which he links clients' misperceptions of time with their identification with their parents' trauma-a commentary bolstered later in the text through attention to biological perspectives on nature of trauma and psychological resilience. Although I enjoyed the text very much, I found myself wanting to learn more about the author's model of normative male psychological development. At various points, Brenner hints at his notion of the masculine self and how it develops in response to trauma, healing, and resilience. …