THE HANDSTAND

JUNE 2007


  THE ONLY LAUGH IS IN THE FREUDIAN SLIP

The psychiatrist's couch during the 20th Century was no less ruled by concepts of fear than the religious rites of previous eras. Freud's concept of the 'id' and the 'ego' - it had been believed - were never completely understood because the English language had an incapacity to translate their true positiopn in the canon of the mind. As a result the English speaking world grew up with a new but constant inner fear syndrome - this time with the belief that every mind contained an alien persona that could and would constantly, and in some cases irreperably, undermine the conscious mind. The unconscious refuge of this 'id' could not be placated or undermined either by the individual's will power, or even with understanding and control . A medical intervention on the psychiatrist's couch would endeavour to introduce each patient who undertook a course of memory retrieval and repair within the interupted or malign mental condition, to the fact that it could never wholly abandon an internal threat ,or that a more or less complete and alternate human persona lay within each human mind. In addition Freud had linked this hidden persona to the sexual irregularities, desires, lusts, that he envisaged haunting the human race from infancy - - stemming from fantasies of the imagination and always linked to repression of communicative faculties immured in the immature from infancy and childhood.

From that suspended world of inner repression there was, beyond the domestic world, the social world - new contrasts that were brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The women of the aristocratic world had figured as inhabitants of a paradise, where no effort was spared by domestic servants of every kind to place the women of the household in a suspended inert physical pattern that consummated the social power and presence of the male, the father of the family. Thus the new entrepreneurs, the trading speculators, the middle and upper middle classes, and their rich inheritors sought a complete imitation and transformation of ordinary life to the aristocratic status and pattern. However before very long their womenfolk tired of reading novels and practising a musical education of 'refinement', began to search for and absorb education with a new intent. These new perspectives were governed by a boredom that pervaded the 'queen bee' world that had fostered the silly romance of novels. They were soon enabled by other means than sex to move out into the male world beyond the 'domestic' arena.

The famous volume 'The Second Sex' by Simone de Beauvoire consolidated a new generation's advance into the universities, and further invading the professional world's of the doctor, the lawyer etc. And in recent years, no longer the secretary or assistant, women moved intothe business and political worlds. While that emerging female, within men's offices and management systems rapidly consolidated a split level office and domestic position within the human family, men at first were able to take superior advantages of time and independence to pursue financial speculation and movement within established hierarchies. Thus also they invaded the aristocratic world where a choice of companions and neighbours of leisured intelligence prevailed. This traditional strata of society they then destroyed and replaced friendship with economic alliances. Marriage and property linked contracts that had been the aristocrats due within the economic world were absolved by the forms of marriage that this new social matrix conceived, rapid divorce, aggressive settlements and the immense ganglions of social fame through money and the arts. These new class concepts were simultaneously imitated and retained by a new social layer of economically rich innovators in a 'modern' world as we know it today.

As we know, during the 1900's science as well as war transformed the world. Especially the domestic world eradicatingthe domestic slave servants of the previous eras. The new world of opportunity created the 'feminist' groups with concepts of human rights, women's rights that began to invade the political outlooks of government. To employ all women - a concept that attracted the government economist's who moved on rapidly from family concerns to the welcome of an entirely new tax layer for government resources.

A gap in well-being suddenly appeared as the working class became stranded in the competitive world of modern industrial versus stock and share holdings that removed long term job security. The farmer and agricultural workers also became the victim of the middle man, receiving insufficient income from their work and produce. Appalling poverty began to assert itself in strikes, protest at the shocking greed of trade and industrial 'aristocrats' who surfaced from the middle classes; a class who survived by ensuring that imitations of 'class' were thrust into education and consumer policies in every social group. the political groups fractured in 'left' and 'right' - the 'right' ofcourse encapsulating the capitalists in every meaning...

In our modern world the dinosaurs of political parties are scarcely confronted by independent policies of development that now loom as possible escape hatches from the doom scenarios that we are otherwise condemned to - and that is everybody, all classes, all nodes of status and economic stature. The messages from the environment , that has become irreperably changed by industrial pollution, electronic mismanagment, and national interests that still pursue their desires with war, using radio-active weapons that kill the armies that use them, and also ruthless extermination of populations with chemical poisons introduced into agricultural food and medicines, have made our world the sport of fools.

We have emerged from a century that became convulsed by party political kings and their consorts whom the richest strata of society virtually employed as their puppets. Social policies that gradually emerged under pressure from forceful men and women took on health and social services to redeem us from the guilt and crimes of dereliction that lay scattered in our wake. Women, the apparent catalyst of all this became a workforce and social layer of extraordinary convenience. They hid up their domestic responsibilities by 'employing' a new layer of slaves to look after and rear their children. Children that subsequently filled up boarding schools and were only inconveniently present for 'holidays'. Paternal and maternal roles vanished and feminist and male chauvanists took their place. Women moved into the media where they have now created amazing control of their 'Rights' and positions in society. Community values, which had been an ordinary animal fact of life, are now invented as social political values bought and sold for the hustings. Economics remain as the solitary choice and decision of the entrepreneur, a gamble held over from the Industrial Revolution. No majority within this social history offered any palimpsest of moral maturity or growth that could knit together to confer community values on society. Feminist concepts of domestic altruism and wisdom of the 'sisters' has disappeared as women battle to survive within the fantasy of their own consumer concepts, pitting the innocence of their children against marriage contracts and divorce that utterly distort the family and thrust betrayal and misery and anger on infants and young people. Women have begun to rule each other disregarding the community of essential events, birth, health, love and celebration. They now rule from within political and legal hierarchies and perhaps also the educational world where they have begun to outnumber male educators. Within education ,the flame of the scholar will die, the concept that education and learning have a seperate world from the economic or capitalist struggle - where history and art, music,and theatre were accepted as of vital interest for future political worlds or even existing worlds.


Perhaps we women should think about the hundreds of years that have conditioned men's responses and tolerance and behaviour - maybe justice too, which they created, is a reliable gauge of private behaviour as well. Also their lightning wit of cynicism and irony so seldom found among women reveals the mind that without hesitating adopted many of the feminist dictats without feeling humiliated in any way. Man accepts essentials and ridicules the meaningless wrath of words.Maybe their wit is the only true sign of the hidden identity............?