Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but when I hear the phrase “developmental neuro-endocrinology” I get really excited.

Allow me to explain.

Like many psychotherapists, I’ve grown increasingly interested in the rapidly advancing understanding of how neural processes guide the formation of our personalities and shape our present moment experience. My initial interest in this subject arose out of my training in attachment theory and attachment-focused therapy. Through this training I came to appreciate the complex and interdependent relationship between brain development and secure attachment, which might be summarized like this: proper neural development is what makes healthy relationships possible…but it cannot occur without the experience of healthy relationships during childhood development.

In addition to attachment, my other passion in therapy is masculinity. In fact, these days I work almost exclusively with men. As a result, I spend a great deal of my time helping men understand the workings of their own minds – both in and of themselves, and also in relation to women’s minds. Because men are so deeply conditioned to discount their own capacity for emotional insight, it is very often a revelation to discover that the ways men’s and women’s minds operate is in fact understandable. And it can be life-transforming to discover that it is possible for these two sorts of minds to understand each other and to communicate constructively across the gender divide. That’s why, to my patients I often describe my role as a “translator.”*

Developmental neuro-endocrinology seems to me to be a sort of bridge between attachment-based and gender-specific psychotherapeutic work. Which is why I read Louann Brizendine’s The Male Brain with great interest. In this book Brizendine (as she did in her previous book The Female Brain) isolates a particular aspect of the vast field of neurological research: the way in which the brain’s growth is shaped by developmentally-triggered releases of gender-specific neuro-hormones. How (and when) testosterone, vasopressin and other such hormones are released into the brain creates the subjective experience of “maleness” and leads to the objective behaviors that we identify as typically male.

Brizendine is working in the tradition of writers who integrate a complex body of inter-disciplinary research into a coherent narrative, making visible patterns and relationships between the data that might otherwise be unavailable to a larger audience. Dan Siegel and Allan Schore are masters of this particular art, and they are undeniably more rigorous in their approach. In fact, Brizendine has been strongly criticized for presenting isolated and un-replicated pieces of research to make overly broad claims in support of a reductive and stereotypical image of masculinity across the life span.

I suspect that these criticisms are accurate. But at the same time I found that many of Brizendine’s assertions rang fundamentally true to my clinical experience. And that is the heart of the dilemma that I experience with The Male Brain.

Without in any way wishing to minimize the importance of male gender-role socialization, I agree with Brizendine’s central premise – that there are certain aspects of both masculinity and femininity which are powerfully biologically determined, and which no amount of socialization can combat. (Certainly any parent will recognize the truth in her description of the differences between boys’ and girls’ play. While you can get a boy to play with dolls, he’s very likely to turn Barbie into a gun; and you can get a girl to play with toy cars, but she’s just as likely to turn them into a little car family.) To my mind, accepting that these biologically-determined gender differences exist is the first step toward developing approaches to parenting, education, and therapy which can help us raise boys into good men. Having some understanding of where biologically-determined leaves off and socialized behavior allows us to raise boys in ways which ameliorate rather than exacerbate those biological tendencies. And I sincerely believe that raising good men is essential if we are to survive and thrive as a species.

So, I buy the thesis. And yet my personal experience as a man bears so little relationship to the masculinity described in The Male Brain that I am simultaneously left completely confused about how to make sense of her data in my own life. How can something that feels so fundamentally true in general, feel so untrue to me as an individual?

This contradiction became most evident to me in Brizendine’s description of male flirting behavior in a chapter called “The Mating Brain.” She describes a sequence of non-verbal behaviors through which her “typical” man (Ryan) pursues a woman to whom he is attracted:

“If we could have watched the play-by-play of Ryan’s nonverbal body movements we would have him walk casually but deliberately toward Nicole, hoping she’d look up. Once she did, we’d see him tilt his chin and raise his eyebrows ever so slightly, smiling as he took a step closer.”

Brizendine goes on to describe in detail the sequence of Ryan’s aggressive “pursuit” behaviors, filtering them through the specific neuro-hormones which she believes are driving them.

Now, I immediately recognized the behavioral sequence she describes. I’ve watched it happen a million times. It’s something men do. But I have never in my life done anything like it. (In fact, Brizendine’s methodical description of flirting behavior was actually a sort of revelation to me: that’s how you do it!) In saying this, I’m not intending to place any particular value on my own behavior. It’s simply my experience. Flirting is a mystery to me. Aggressively pursuing a woman for sex is something I have never done. The idea of competing with other men over a potential mate or of trying to sleep with another man’s partner is completely foreign to me.

So where does that leave me? Is there, as I wondered at the start of this, something wrong with me? Am I somehow less of a man?

There are a lot of easy jokes to be made at my expense right here. But the question is serious. Because I know with certainty that I am not alone, that other men experience degrees of separation from the supposed masculine norm which serves as the baseline for The Male Brain. How do we account for this? One possibility is that differences in the experience of masculinity are a matter natural of biological variation…some men simply have higher testosterone levels than others, for instance. It’s not inconceivable that one day these variations will come to be defined as a medical disorder: sub-optimal masculinity. But is it actually sub-optimal? In evolutionary terms, it might be. But are there other ways of seeing this issue, other ways of valuing behaviors which deviate from the evolutionary norm?

And there’s yet another way of addressing this question. What if the fundamental biological truth of our gender-specific experience is more capable of change than we believe? After all, the research is increasingly showing how malleable the brain is over the lifespan. Which is why psychotherapy works. In fact, I fully believe that as I work with men in therapy that we are literally re-wiring their neural connections. The brain, in Norman Doidge’s expression, “changes itself.”

And this brings me back to attachment.

Although most people are born with a clearly identifiable gender, no one is born with a particular attachment style. That is created inter-personally. Nonetheless, there are powerful cultural forces which shape the ways in which attachment styles develop in men and women. Attachment balances two fundamental poles of human experience: intimacy and autonomy. A person with a secure attachment style has the ability to fully experience both of these states…and, more importantly, to be able to move fluidly between them.

But gender-role socialization often works against this ideal developmental course. In broad terms, men are socialized to seek autonomy while eschewing intimacy, and women tend to be socialized in exactly the opposite direction. Another way of saying this is that as a culture we take the predispositions that men and women are born with and we intensify them and lock them in place. The stereotype of the intimacy-challenged man has its roots in this cultural truth.

But developmental neuro-endocrinology is not destiny. Brain states do not automatically lead to behavior. Attachment security can be “earned.” So while men may not be able to control the flood of hormones that washes through their brains at certain developmental stages, they are certainly capable of developing an observing ego which watches the flood without being swept away by it. They can do this in the same way that a trauma survivor learns to experience the memory of his experience without succumbing to a flashback, the same way someone who suffered abusive parenting as a child can rise above the landmines of the past and become a healthy parent to her own child. To be fair, Brizendine does at times discuss aspects of this process of change, but the bulk of her descriptions of clinical interactions seem to involve her reassuring her patients that “this is just the way men are.” Whatever her views on therapeutic change, she seems to have recognized that it was sexier (so to speak) to play up her central claim: that boys will be boys.

In the end, this is where I come down on The Male Brain: it presents an extraordinarily helpful way of understanding the “typical” male brain, but at the same time it does a great injustice to the fact that masculinity is not a unitary or an unchangeable phenomenon. It fails to address the crucial question of variability (whether biologically- or socially-determined) along the continuum of masculine experience. And it gives short-shrift to men’s capacity to take charge of their own brains.

It was truly a bizarre experience to read a book which felt at once so validating and so alienating. I can only hope that it might serve as a stepping stone toward a treatment of masculinity which both appreciates the biological under-pinnings of the masculine identity while also acknowledging and respectfully describing the existence of a spectrum of healthy masculinities.

*I’ve been greatly aided in this effort by the work of Deborah Tannen, who has done such important work on the differences between male and female communication styles, and whose books I regularly recommend to my patients.