Book excerpt: In this book, Yael Pilowsky Bankirer reads into Freud's writings with the unique prism of circumcision as a marker for both the formation of masculine identity, and for matricide, the disappearance of the mother. Pilowsky Bankirer uses Freud’s idea of circumcision within a text as a Leitfossil: a key-fossil through which an unresolved unconscious conflict can be traced. She conducts a close reading of Freud’s texts – including Little Hans, The Wolf Man, Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism – to illuminate and uncover the textual unconscious, deconstruct the explicit narrative and open alternative psychoanalytic possibilities inherent to the encounter with the maternal realm. Throughout the volume, Pilowsky Bankirer informs her analysis by considering the work of Freud in tandem with that of Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Benjamin, Butler and more. Psychoanalytic Explorations of the Masculine and the Maternal: Uncovering the Image of Circumcision in Freud’s Works will be of interest to scholars of psychoanalysis and practising analysts alike, particularly those interested in the intersection of gender studies and psychoanalysis.