D o n a l d M e l t z e r - U n p u b l i s h e d T a l k s

Talks, papers, fragments from later years (some previously published) click here for pdf by email

`A reverie on the baby’s interior preoccupation’ `Adolescence – after the hurricane: a newspaper report’ `The architectonics of paranoia’ `Good luck’ `On Bion’s Grid’ `Thought disorders’ `On thought disorder’ `On observation and counter-dreaming’ `Projective identification and Weltanschauung’ `Concerning signs and symbols’ `On symbol formation and allegory’ `Models of the mind’

Patches of blue: the decline of the male Talk given in 1998, contributed by Dorothy Hamilton Summary: A view from the hermitage of the consulting room of the evolution of sexual values and practices which are gradually shifting biblical male dominance and its terrors of the female towards a more friendly and rational, albeit less exciting, basis. I should say something about being invited to be keynote speaker at a seminar like this, because I myself haven’t got anywhere close to the millennium yet. My point of view comes from a sort of Victorian folly called psychoanalysis, which is still struggling out of the 19^th century as far as I can see, and has an extremely limited view of the culture we live in, derived second-hand from our parents. This is only slightly augmented by the fact that I have travelled very widely, teaching in various places, and that gives me a view of other cultures. Also, I come from a different culture myself, and that makes the culture of this country very vivid to me by contrast. When I came here in 1954 the contrast was very great, but, thanks to the vulgarisation of the Thatcher era, it is no longer so great. Very disappointing, but there it is. It’s largely the consequences of this vulgarisation that I am (probably) going to talk about. It seems to me that the bombardment by the entertainment industry, the alteration in values of the Thatcher era in favour of wealth production and so on, the scramble for social status promoted by the car industry, has had a tremendous effect on the male population, starting very early. It has seduced boys back to the television and later their computer games, and to the sort of secret culture that is fairly unknown to their parents’ generation; this has given them a sense of superiority over their parents and has emboldened them, you might say, in relation to parental values and parental expectations. The impact on the girl population has been quite different. It seems to have accelerated puberty by at least two years, both physical and mental, and has, it seems to me, had also an emboldening [empowering] effect on them, but in a very different way that strikes one as being both useful and probably rather admirable. You might say they are no longer frightened of being raped. Well, bravo. So they walk home alone at night and often get assaulted in one way or another, but it doesn’t seem to be the devastating experience their mothers might have expected. It is in line with being whistled at by the workmen in the street, which they are very blasé about. So we have this fundamental [divergence] between the sexes, with the boys becoming more withdrawn, more passive, more gregarious in a pub sort of way, and failing to develop interests at school. They don’t necessarily do badly at school, but they certainly lack interest, and do not develop passions for anything except their Nintendo games or those peculiar skates that they spring around on. Their passionate life seems to me markedly withdrawn and markedly skewed in the direction of passivity, and, when asked for a title, I gave ‘The decline of the male’ because I think this is something that is happening, and is worrying individually but also worrying in terms of the culture. I see the difference on the faces of the young people as I drive along the High Street in Oxford on the way to work. The boys look really dishevelled, rather dispirited in their facial expressions, a bit weak in their eyes; and the girls stride along in a manner that used to be called manful. And what I hear from my undergraduate patients seems to bear out this alteration: that the girls have to seek out the boys, which amounts to a kind of sharing of the television culture and leads directly into mutual masturbation, homosexuality and so on. The boys expect to be sought out and, if they are at all good-looking, seem tremendously to fancy themselves as irresistible; the struggle with them in analysis is to get them to be interested in anything. They seem to be pure examples of Freud’s pleasure principle, and words like ‘easy’ and ‘fun’ and ‘holiday’ sprinkle their vocabularies in a way that squeezes out anything like ‘love’ and ‘adventure’, ‘excitement’ and ‘desire’ and so on. The transition that one expects psychoanalytically from puberty to adolescence and from adolescence to the beginnings of adulthood seems very blurred. The boys’ gang and the girls’ gang of puberty seems to carry on – at least for the boys, not so much for the girls – and the transition from adolescent boyhood to manhood is very retarded for the boys, so that they remain boyish almost indefinitely. They are usually jogged out of it to some extent by the birth of their first child, but somehow they often do not [emotionally] engage in that experience of life, of reproduction. It seems to impinge on them primarily as a deprivation – deprivation of sleep, deprivation of sex, deprivation of attention from their partners or wives or concubines of whoever they happen to have produced the child by – because they are busy, it seems to me, with the only thing that interests them deeply and that is status; and status is equated with money and earnings, and the kind of car you drive and the kind of holidays you take. I sympathise with them in a way in their loss of athletic interests in favour of body-building – which seems to be mainly a narcissistic pursuit – because the sports that interest them are ones that are tremendously commercialised and invite spectator participation, such as football. But even the more individual sports have been a bit spoiled by the invention of superior equipment – the marvellous tennis racket which enables anybody to play tennis, the marvellous ski boot that enables anybody to ski – and I think this takes a lot of the pleasure out of accomplishment in these sports. What they get left with is golf, which remains challenging because, no matter how good the clubs and the balls, playing golf is really an art that very few people master, and certainly hardly anybody masters without lessons. So I do notice that the men become very obsessed with golf, to a degree that drives their wives to distraction; that they disappear at weekends, and they disappear mentally too, because they are mentally searching for balls in the rough, missing putts, and wondering how Tiger Woods does it. It is amazing the excellence with which golf is played professionally and, of course, also the vast sums that are earned these days which seem, for the male, to carry on the momentum of the Thatcher era. The transition on the other hand of the women, from girlhood to womanhood, seems to me to be both social and much more biological, in spite of the ads we are confronted with telling us that size makes a big difference and being ‘bigger than John’s’ and so on. The girls seem fairly quickly to get over being impressed by the male organ and its capacity for erection, and the idea of babies does take hold of them very powerfully. Culturally speaking, they seem to be confronted with a situation where they expect disappointment, and you hear and see things about how to get rid of your husband but keep the children, as a kind of aim in life: how to be a single parent family, how to fight your ex-husband in the courts. The idea of the meeting of the sexes in a happy co-operative adventure seems to survive in a sort of minimal group who have been fortunate enough to have the kind of parents who were really united, and with whom we find analytically that the unconscious concept of a combined object is really in them. Whereas it does seem to be absent in most adult males and females who seem to have carried over the blatant superior separation and incommunicado status of their objects, and their therefore unresolved Oedipal conflicts, so that, when the women become ravished by their desire for children, they are at a bit of a loss from the point of view of identification processes, and many of them opt for negative identifications – that is, finding fault with their mothers and trying to do the opposite. Within five to ten years they discover they are doing exactly the same: they are screaming at their children, threatening them, depriving them of contact and so on – where their intention had been to do exactly the opposite. Now as I say, this is really a view from this peculiar folly of the analytic consulting room and it is in a sense an old man’s view as well. It is bound to say ‘we did better and we had it better, and I don’t know what is happening to the younger generation’. But, invited to a meeting like this, I’m bound to say what I think, though it’s not very encouraging. But I think the encouraging thing is that this very biological passion that women have for babies is overcoming what I called, in my little introduction, the male biblical fear of the woman. I think that male dominance and male bullying and tyranny has always been based on fear of the woman, and very fundamentally on fear of her genitalia, those bleeding, unclean genitalia of the biblical days, the powerful seductive genitalia of Tamar and Ruth [Delilah, Jezebel] – irresistible. The fear of the female genitals has been overcome to a certain extent in men and boys by improved anatomical knowledge, but I’m afraid anatomical knowledge is not much more use in these matters than knowing the names of parts of your car when it breaks down. Noise in the carburettor – what does that mean? It creates a sense of knowledge and mastery, but in fact the female is more mysterious today than she was apprehended to be in the past, when she was frighteningly unclean and her belly was getting swollen periodically, and she was turning all her passion and feelings towards this child. Today her mentality is much more mysterious to men, and it seems to me it’s a very difficult thing for them to pay attention to. They tend, instead of paying attention to the mystery of their woman’s mentality, to be content to try to attract her attention and her interest in their mentality – which unfortunately tends, with the help of the advertising media, to mean attention and interest in their genitals. I think they are losing that game, that the women are beginning to realise something about the anatomy also – to realise that the penis is just a conduit through which the semen and the urine flows, and it is not an organ of remarkable interest any more than it is an organ of remarkable beauty, so that the male population is losing its pulling power, you might say, its attraction. It’s true that the male body is very beautiful when it is in good condition and when it is employed in a graceful and effective way, but it takes a great deal of love for a woman to see the male genitals as beautiful. The pubertal and pre-pubertal girl may be in awe of them because there is a lot of fear of them, but once the fear is overcome, they then lost their fascination and the power of dominion. But there is a great mystery in the female internal genitals, with their production of eggs, insemination and fertilisation and the growth of the foetus. The beauty of this mystery, it seems to me, lies behind the enhanced self-respect that one finds in women. It doesn’t have much to do with gaining the vote or having access to employment and income. I think it has a lot to do with the recognition of the mystery of the beauty of the reproductive process, in relation which, of course the male – although his function in producing semen is equally mysterious, but can be so degraded by semen banks and such things, which are equivalent really to keeping the men as studs – the male reproductive capacity has lost its kudos, because it has lost its beauty for the imagination. I don’t think this is irrecoverable, but it is in dire straits at the moment, it seems to me. It is worth remembering that Freud’s whole theory of castration anxiety never mentioned the testicles, was all penis, and somehow male psychology hasn’t much caught up with this problem. It is not so true in the Mediterranean and South American cultures, where a man is spoken of with admiration as having big balls. Well, that’s hopeful. Now, the victim in this has been the process called falling in love, and the differentiation between making love and having sex. The term ‘making love’ is used either with embarrassment, or in such an automatic tick-like way as to be meaningless, so that people seem largely to mean having sex or, in fact, masturbating one another. The cult of the orgasm is linked to the cult of the erect penis. ‘Good in bed’ seems to mean giving orgasms because of the size of the penis and the vigour with which it is accomplished. I think it’s a sad story but I think it is fairly clear that the dawn, the renaissance that is coming is a renaissance connected with the beauty and mystery of the reproductive process. One of the troubles about it is that, at the present time, by the time children reach puberty and adolescence, most of them inflict such distress on their parents that it is very hard for parents to look forward to their growing up; but that does seem to me to be cultural and it is not universal. It is certainly connected with things like the rate of unemployment and the loss of job security, all of which, along with the destruction of the Labour Unions, were the main accomplishments of the Thatcher era, which ushered in this craze for privatization. The disillusionment with these processes is accumulating. I notice, for instance, that the differentiation between Communism and Stalinism has finally penetrated fairly widely, and I am interested to see that a Communist has been asked to form the new government in Italy – but of course the Communist party in Italy never was Stalinist as far as I know. So I don’t want to convey to you the idea that I am gloomy about the future because I have to die so the rest can go to hell. I really do feel very optimistic, but my optimism is rooted first of all in the women, and their filling the vacuum of vitality left by this withdrawal of the male population from their own imagination, interest and passion. But as always, my trust is in the artistic community, that is not going to be swallowed up by the commercialisation of art, and by the media and the film industry and the entertainment industry, but is going to state its ideas and its attitudes and feelings artistically. It is probably music that will pull us through eventually. It is a great shame that much less music is taught in schools, both primary and secondary, and parents seem to be less and less willing to spend the time and money to get their children taught an instrument. And of course, if you can play the television and Nintendo games, who wants to blow a flute? But I think eventually even the terrible pop music begins to sound a bit musical, and they will eventually learn that they do have good instruments and the instruments will teach them. I am a bit more worried about the artists, because of the modern things like acrylics replacing oil-painting, and the brush and the spray-gun replacing technique; but we have museums full of old masters, and I am heartened to see that the museums are more and more crowded. The galleries that sell modern works are not crowded. What I am trying to convey to you from this really severely behind-the-times point of view is that, seen from the vantage point of say, 1950, things look terrible. One is always nostalgically distorting the past, but still there has been a marked change in values, and with it a marked change in culture. I am trying to see what Richard in Mrs Klein’s Narrative of a Child Analysis called ‘patches of blue’.