Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This study of creativeness, sex and gender demonstrates the relationship of the intellectual to the personal and sexual, not only in the creative arts but in science and technology too. Typically male habits of thought are traced to a developmental crisis experienced by small boys - the male 'wound'. This wound leads to a splitting of imaginative preoccupation, inclining men to see people as though they were things, and things as though they were people. The authors show this pattern to have highly significant costs and benefits. It enables men to invest the world of machines and of abstract ideas with intense emotional significance, but it also renders them vulnerable both to personal insensitivity and misogyny, and to the grosser forms of sexual perversion. In the creative arts, this split can be healed. Even here, though, the costs are high, for the artist and for those who inspire him, as examples from the worlds of photography, poetry and painting reveal.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

An interesting, although occasionally disjointed, theoretical analysis of men's gender and sexual roles. After an incisive historical introduction to the topic, the authors present a theoretical analysis of what they term "the male 'wound'." Although parallels could be drawn to Robert Bly's Iron John (CH, Mar'91) or Sam Keen's Fire in the Belly (1991), Hudson and Jacot provide a much more compelling case for developmental crises among infant boys and the resulting "wounds" they suffer. A particularly attractive aspect is that the authors posit a lengthy set of testable hypotheses for subsequent work on men/masculinity. Much of the book is built on Hudson's earlier works, some of which are listed in the reference section. Some may miss out on the book, given the recent array of competing works; this would be unfortunate, since the authors, in many ways, break new ground. The Way Men Think seems most appropriate for readers who seek a fresh approach to men and sexual/gender roles, those studying men's roles in society, and for upper-division undergraduate and graduate students. A. C. Downs; formerly, University of Houston-Clear Lake

Booklist Review

This husband-and-wife writing team, respectively a scientist and a painter with a strong interest in psychology, attempt to explain gender differences by postulating that males, in their childhood attempts to separate from their mothers, suffer an irreparable developmental "male wound" that makes men think, act, and feel differently than women do. Hudson and Jacot downplay gender-based biochemical differences, which medical and scientific researchers are increasingly proving influential in human development, in favor of an extreme and outmoded psychological theory with Freudian overtones. According to this theory, the "wound" makes men better skilled at abstract reasoning and at mechanical and scientific endeavors than women are. It also contributes to male dominance, insensitivity, and eroticism. To back up their argument, the authors find isolated examples in the lives of famous and infamous males, such as physicist Isaac Newton, murderer Gary Gilmore, psychologist B. F. Skinner, and photographer Edward Weston. A controversial, jargon-filled book that lacks substantiation but makes for heated debate and adds a modern-day twist to some hoary psychoanalytic tenets. ~--Mary Banas

Kirkus Book Review

According to the husband-and-wife team of scientist Hudson (Nightlife: The Interpretation of Dreams, 1986) and Jacot (a painter and psychological researcher), the psychological differences between men and women arise from a trauma suffered during infancy by men, in differentiating themselves from their mothers. This trauma, the authors say, creates a ``wound'' predisposing men intellectually to abstract, formal, and mechanical thought, occupationally to being scientists and technicians, and emotionally to depersonalizing women and to humanizing objects. The most interesting and eloquent passages here refer to the relationship between ``eros and intellect'' in great men such as Isaac Newton, philosophers such as Descartes, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and students of human behavior such as Kinsey, Freud, and Skinner--whose systems of thought, the authors say, were depersonalized versions of their own ``wound,'' and who made productive use of the energy created by their developmental crises. The most moving passages involve creative artists--Weston the photographer, Hardy the poet, and Bonnard the painter--whose depersonalizations of women were raised to the level of art while their personal lives displayed their failure to relate to living women. (This paradigm, the authors argue, also pertains to sexual deviants.) Despite its adherence to debatable ideas (e.g., that men are imperfect women; that homosexuality is a perversion; that the origins of art are pathological, and its expression compensatory), this study is especially interesting in a late-feminist cultural setting and in its speculative approach to what Hudson and Jacot call the ``gender industry,'' as they complement recent scientific studies of the biological basis of sexuality. Most fascinating, though, is how the book vividly both illustrates its own thesis and undermines it: characterized by formality, mechanical thinking, abstraction, depersonalization, and misogyny, the intellectual style supposedly conditioned by the male ``wound,'' it was co-authored by a woman as well as by a man. (Ten illustrations--not seen.)