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............?
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