Life with father
AFTERTHOUGHT PATRICK HUTBER
There is a fairly general belief that the inter- pretation of life advanced by the Freudian school is so outrageously at variance with what common sense would lead one to expect that (depending on one's point of view) either deep insight or deep credulity is required to be able to make much of it.
Such has never been my experience. On the contrary, I find myself frequently surprised by the clarity with which on all sides textbook mechanisms can be seen to work. I have never been able to doubt the reality of infantile aggression since, on entering the nursery of a daughter then six months old—she bad been crying loudly—I was greeted with bared lips and a ferocious snarl. At that moment in time, I have no doubt, she would if she could have torn me limb from limb. Nor, having seen her older sister beat her head on the ground in des- pair at the failure of our repeated attempts to understand what she was saying, do I have any difficulty in realising how intense is the frustra- tion which small children have to learn to en- dure.
But it is not my purpose to engage in even Freudianly orientated nursery chatter, because in my experience the real illumination comes from casting an analytic eye over some of the more alarming phenomena of modern life.
Take the Red Guards for example. Nothing could seem more disturbing and at first sight more mysterious than to see these hordes of senior school-children submitting themselves utterly to the will of Mao Tse-tung, rampaging through the streets of Chinese cities. reacting with barbarism and violence to anyone thought to 'oppose them, humiliatine and even driving to suicide some of China's more revered scholars.
And yet there is an interpretation which at least makes sense of this. Here is a civilisation which for countless centuries has paid almost infinite respect to its ancestors, so that each generation has had to repress fairly severely its aggression towards the previous one. Quite abruptly that whole system is overthrown, and a totally different ethic substituted, with what- ever wrenching of the psyche such a change may involve.
Oddly enough, a similar mechanism can be
seen at work much nearer home. Richard Lester's How 1 Won the War is both a pacifist tract and one of the most aggressive films made in recent times. Clearly the violence he feels within himself and so strongly rejects is both bearable and permissible when used to destroy the cherished beliefs, such as patriotism, of an older generation, and turned against such not- able father figures as Winston Churchill.
These are isolated, though I believe signi- ficant, examples. The feature of contemporary life however on which I find Freudian concepts throw the greatest light is the one which attracts so much attention, and causes so much apparent puzzlement, the emergence of the beat genera- tion. It could be said that from one point of view the most surprising thing about the current scene is the surprise with which the older generation appears to react to that completely normal phenomenon, the revolt of one genera- tion against the previous one.
But there is one feature of the present situa- tion which does invite comment, and that is the apparent intensity of the revolt, the exaltation of youth, the depicting of adolescence as a way of life instead of just a stepping-stone to adult- hood, and the consequent rejection of all adult values. I suggest that behind the apparent care- free mood of youth (a mood of course greatly played up by the press) lies profound anxiety. Some anxiety at this stage is of course natural. The onset of sexual feeling at puberty revives the Oedipal anxieties of infancy. From this point of view it is not surprising that pubescent girls should choose long-haired pop-singers as their idols, males who in their hirsuteness bear a comforting resemblance to their worshippers' own sex. Nor that the young men themselves should express their ambiguous feelings through an appearance of sexual ambiguity.
But it goes further than this. There has been a great deal of nonsense talked about the per- missive society but there is no doubt that in one respect there is greater permissiveness— parents as a whole are increasingly anxious to give their children greater freedom and increas- ingly reluctant to assert their authority. The trouble is that the line between being libertarian and being weak and ineffective is often difficult to perceive. One of the harder things that young people have to do is to accept adulthood, and to adopt their parents' roles. At the best of times this, as I said, is an anxiety-provoking situation. But if you have a society in which (as is the case) less and less respect is being given to age, and in which parents are liable to appear progressively (in both senses of the term) weaker, is it surprising that a proportion of the younger generation is reluctant to assume that role? From this point of view the behaviour is neither puzzling nor mysterious, but it is, in the truest sense, disturbing. In short, if this in- terpretation is correct, the new factor in the equation is not the revolt of the young, which is wholly to be expected, but the retreat of the older generation.
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