by HOWARD S. SCHWARTZ
School of Business Administration
Oakland University
Rochester, Michigan 48309-4401
(248) 370-2122 or (248) 684-5345
Schwartz@ Oakland.edu
Human
Relations 49
(9), August, 1996: 1013-1040. C The Tavistock Institute
I have received a
great deal of help on this paper and I am grateful for all of it. I would especially
like to acknowledge Penny Simpson, Ann Penner
Winston, Rose Mersky,
Yiannis Gabriel, and an anonymous reviewer for Human Relations.
Close to the heart of
the postmodernist project is the denigration of the father, typically called
the patriarch. This widely ranging denunciation, which has its theoretical
roots in the work of Foucault and Derrida, has continued, primarily with
feminist writers, in virtually every field. (For a recent
example in the management field see Sinclair, 1995). It is unrelievedly negative. According to this view, the father
has oppressed and marginalized all those who are not like himself, fashioning
the discourses of "civilization" to support and obscure this
oppression. Under cover of this camouflage, he has pursued only his selfish
interest, not caring at all for anyone else. More than just controlling, he
represents control itself, and were it not for his domination, freedom and
self-expression would have reigned. Were it not for him, the different voices
that he has silenced would have been able to create their own discourses,
making a world full of difference and multifarious beauty. So terrible is this
tyrant and the social order he created, that resistance to it can provide a
basic direction for an individual's life.
Now this is a very
heavy indictment and a skeptic might wonder at its balance. Surely there have
been malignant fathers. These fathers have sinned, this skeptic might agree,
but have there not been benign and even beneficent ones, as well. If it is fair
to say that civilization has represented patriarchal domination, certainly it
has also manifested concern for the well being of the groups he has led. How
does one account for the unqualified character of this denunciation? To make
sense of it, one must assume that the evil he has done has so far outweighed
the good that it is not necessary even to measure the latter.
But what was this
evil? What did the father do, or what was he believed to have done, that was
responsible for this absolute condemnation? Surely this cannot have been just
the collection of sins that fathers have committed, on the order of the sins
that all human beings commit. It cannot have been just the sins of fathers. It
must have been more than that. Let us call it the Sin of the Father. What,
then, was the Sin of the Father?
My contention is that
one cannot answer the question of the Sin of the Father without a comprehension
of the meaning of the accusation itself. But the idea of patriarchal evil
cannot be understood in isolation. It did not emerge out of no
place. Rather, it expressed and represented a social dynamic of the time.
Understanding it, then, must require understanding that social dynamic and
seeing the place of the idea within it. That will be the purpose of this essay.
I will examine the roots of the belief in the badness of the father, looking at
its social origins and its psychodynamics, trying ultimately to reveal its
meaning. My course of investigation will require the elucidation of the
connection between the father and the corporation man, a figure who is deeply
involved in this play of meanings. I will proceed from there to an analysis of
his family. In the end, we will be better able to understand the nature of the
Sin of the Father.
The
Alienated Student
By general agreement,
postmodernism, and the attendant assault on the father, began in the late 1960s
(e.g. Best and Kellner, 1991). But focusing on its
representations as they arose in the protests of the time overlooks the
possibility that there were broader cultural dimensions present. It would be
the continued influence of these dimensions that would account for the
persistence of the postmodern assault after its immediate cause was eliminated.
That is the assumption I will make. I will look at postmodern expression, and
the attendant antagonism toward the father, as a broader cultural force which
had its origins in the postwar period, and in the 1950s especially, to which
the protests of the late 1960s gave direction, but not birth.
In doing this I will
be, in a sense, retracing my own steps. For the critique of the patriarch has
had a deep resonance with me, even if it has also, more recently, deeply
disturbed me. Trying to understand it, and my reactions to it, I am trying to
understand myself. I am also trying to understand my father, and my
relationship to him, as a way of finding, and creating, within myself, the
capacity to be a father in my own right. My starting point will be a book that
has often felt to me, despite differences in detail, like a dissection of my
own psyche. This was a study by Kenneth Keniston
(1960) of what he called "the uncommitted," a group of alienated
students at
By
"alienated," Keniston meant "the
rejection of the roles, values, and institutions [the alienated individual]
sees as typical of adult American life" (p.25). As he points out, there
is, a priori, no reason to suppose that such a rejection would entail an
entire outlook on life, but that was, in fact, what Keniston
found:
the rejection of the
dominant values, roles, and institutions of our society... was almost always a
part of a more general alienated ideology, embracing not only attitudes toward
the surrounding society, but towards the self, others, groups, even the
structure of the universe and the nature of knowledge. (p.56)
Keniston describes this outlook in some
detail, stressing especially the "deep and pervasive mistrust of any and
all commitments, be they to other people, to groups, to American culture, or
even to the self." (P.56) But for our purposes the most interesting
characterizations were those which clearly presage the postmodernism of our
time. In order to illustrate this, I will quote passages from Keniston and associate them with postmodern themes.
Alienated
Students
|
Postmodernism
|
|
the universe itself is basically
empty and meaningless. (61) |
Denial of objective reality |
|
In such a pessimistic, anxiety-provoking, and “dead”
universe, truth necessarily becomes subjective and even solipsistic. The alienated
are true to the logic of their position, and almost to a man accept the
subjectivity and even the arbitrariness of their own points of view.( 62) |
Subjectivism, Relativism |
|
Whatever sense of meaning a man may have must inevitably
be his own creation. (62) |
Social Constructionism |
|
Above all, they have contempt for those who “blind
themselves” to the “realities” of existence by “pious optimism,” shallow
consolations, and the easy acceptance of the traditional verities of our
society. Part of the difficulty in communication comes from the
unreliability of appearances. Not only do the alienated generally agree with
a statement like “Beneath the smiling face of man lies a bottomless pit of
evil,” but they affirm that all appearances are suspect, whether of men or
institutions. Thus, nothing can be accepted at face value, every appearance
is likely to be deceptive, and every surface conceals opposite potentials
beneath it. (63) |
Deconstruction |
|
The ethical corollary of anger, scorn, and contempt is
self-interest, and in the alienated we find a special form of
egocentricity(66) which involves the need to use others for one’s own
purposes—and the converse conviction that the same principle governs the
actions of one’s fellows, even when these are disguised under some other
principle.(67) |
Reduction of social process to self-interested politics. |
|
All place primary emphasis on experience and feeling, on
the search for awareness and the cultivation of sentience and perceptiveness...
and they further emphasize the importance of expression of this experience. Almost to a man, they emphasize
what I will call “aesthetic” goals and values... those goals and values whose
primary source is the self, and whose chief aim is the development of
sentience, awareness, and feeling. (71) |
Authenticity |
|
In such an outlook, reason must play a secondary role to
feeling. |
Resistance to reason and “logocentrism |
|
In the struggle for emotion, passion, and feeling, the
enemies are two: first, excessive rationality and self-control, and second,
social pressures which limit independence. (72) |
Resistance to external and internalized social control |
|
The individualism of the alienated is... a solitary and lonely
individualism of the outsider, the man who lives physically within his
society but remains psychologically divorced from it. (73) |
Marginality |
|
The enemy is the entire status quo—not merely pernicious
aspects of the social order which must be changed to permit improvement, but
the entire social and cultural ethos. (78) |
Generalized rage against society |
|
The result is a diffusion and fragmentation of the sense
of identity, an experience of themselves as amorphous, indistinct, and disorganized...Insofar
as they have any clear sense of self it is almost entirely defined by what
they are against, what they despise, by groups they do not want to belong to
and values they consider tawdry. (p.186) |
Fragmentation of identity, negative self-definition |
|
…fear and dislike of competition... leading to an almost
complete repudiation of the competitive business ethic of American society,
to a dislike of and avoidance of social situations with a competitive quality,
and to the continuing view that competition and rivalry, though ubiquitous,
are destructive to all concerned. (P.176) |
Abhorrence of aggressiveness, competition |
|
…a central legacy of childhood for most of these
alienated young men was the deep conviction that adult men—as epitomized by
their own fathers—were not to be emulated, and the further belief that
adulthood in general was disastrous insofar as it meant becoming like their
fathers. (P.178) |
Repudiation of the father |
|
In [their] fantasies... we find [an] exaggerated dream
of the blissfulness of early mother-son relationships, of the capacity of
truly maternal women to provide totally
for men, of the complete absence of distinctions between self and object.
(P.189) |
Appeal of fusion, apotheosis of the maternal, rejection
of the distinction between subject and object. |
|
…for many alienated students, the refusal of adulthood
extends to a rejection of adult
sexuality.... These youths find what our society defines as a “normal”
sexual relationship between man and woman frightening and difficult. Some of
these [difficulties] are common to late adolescents,...
but these are heightened by their fundamental aversion for “aggressiveness,”
for “initiative,” for “activity”—all qualities culturally defined as part of
the male sex role... (p.199) |
Difficulty in developing male heterosexual orientation. |
|
An especially crucial aspect of the failure of
acculturation among the alienated is... their systematic undermining of repression and denial, two of the most common
adaptive techniques in our society (and probably in all societies). (P.197) |
Fascination with the “dark side” of life and society. |
If it may be granted
that Keniston's alienated students represented
postmodernism in its embryonic form, the question then turns to where this
outlook came from and what were its psychodynamics. This is a subject that Keniston explored primarily by interviewing the students
about their family lives, and exploring their psychodynamics through the use of
the Thematic Apperception Test. His explanation, whose theoretical framework
was heavily influenced by Eric Erikson, moves the
subjects' relations to their fathers from one of the themes of their alienation
to its center.
According to Keniston, the theme encountered over and over among these
students was a peculiar family constellation in which the father was seen as
weak, damaged and emotionally distant, while the mother was seen as vigorous,
powerful and vital. There was also a typical family history.
In this history, the
parents came from traditional families, characterized by strong fathers whom
they idealized. But, products of their times, they sought to go beyond these
families, in the sense of creating new roles for themselves that would help
them to express themselves more fully. They began their marriage with these
high ideals, including beliefs in the possibility of new roles for women, but
lost their way. The father gave up his early ideals and settled into a career
that would enable him to make as much money as possible. He became, in a word,
the corporation man. The mother gave up the ideal of a career that would permit
the full expression of her talents and became a housewife.
As time went on, he
became increasingly invested in his career, separating himself physically and
psychologically from the family. She thought less and less of him. He did not,
in her view, sufficiently support her in the realization of her ideals. Nor was
he very much of a man. Certainly he was not the man her father was. She took
their son as an emotional substitute for the husband, drawing him very close to
her, sharing her disappointment in her marriage and her husband, and assigning
to the son the responsibility of fulfilling the ideals that were missing in her
life. The problem was that as she drew the son close to her emotionally, and
made him responsible for her fulfillment, she simultaneously undercut the
father who would ordinarily serve as the son's model of valued achievement. The
result was that the son became what Keniston called a
"pyrrhic victor in the oedipal struggle." He was able to maintain he fantasy of a perfect fusion with his mother, but lost the
possibility of forming the superego.
In order to get a full
idea of what this would mean, it is necessary to discuss the developmental
process that Freud called the Oedipus complex. In doing so, I am going
to add a bit to Keniston's account, based on a more
contemporary understanding of the powerful role of the mother, which does not
in any significant way conflict with Keniston's own
interpretation.
In this account,
developed more fully in Chasseguet-Smirgel (1986) and
Schwartz (1995), the infant's early experience of life is primarily structured
by its relationship with its mother, who is experienced as omnipotent and as a
source of boundless love. As time goes by, of course, the alien, threatening
character of the world makes itself known to the child, who experiences it with
anxiety. The infant uses the fantasy of a return to fusion with the early
omnipotent, bountiful, primordial mother as a way of defending itself against
the harsh and unloving qualities of the world. These harsh and unloving
qualities are often associated with the image of the father, who is experienced
as standing in the way of the child's tight and exclusive relationship with the
mother. The result is an intense rivalry with the father for possession of the
mother.
For the boy and the
girl the fantasy of the return to fusion with the primordial mother are
experienced somewhat differently. The girl is able to project such a fusion
with a degree of equanimity, since she is able to project herself as a mother,
forming both sides of the infant/mother relationship. The boy, however, can
project fusion with the mother only at the cost of losing his own identity, and
of being swallowed up and engulfed in the process. To deal with this he comes
to see the father in a different light. The image of the father shifts from the
monster who has captured the mother, to one who has
earned a place with the mother, who is able to maintain a place with the mother
without being destroyed because he is admirable in her eyes; he has done
something that she values.
As I have argued
elsewhere (Schwartz, 1995), what the primordial mother is understood as valuing
is a sphere in which the expression of her nurturing power could be given its
freest expression, a sphere of love in which the desire of her loved ones would
be satisfied. This gives the foundation of the traditional gender
differentiation, in which the father deals with external reality while the
mother is the central force within the home, the sphere in which emotions
reign. External reality, which I will define in terms of the distinction between
the self and what is not the self, may be thought of as whatever it is that
makes it possible to make a mistake. It is what places constraints on the free
expression of spontaneous impulse. Remove external reality and the constraint
on the free expression of the mother's emotionality becomes unnecessary. Looked at as a process, then, the role of the father is to expand
the sphere of the mother by engaging the external world and removing the
indifferent and alien elements of reality that limit the free and safe
expression of the mother's love. In doing this, the father would have
earned a place in this sphere.
Moreover, a father who
could do this would be one to emulate. This emulation could be projected to
result in a similar relationship for the boy: an adult male who would be valued
by an adult and powerful female on the basis of her appreciation of his
accomplishments. The internalization of this image of the father, in which the
son undertakes the responsibility to participate in the world on a similar
basis, is the classical root for the superego.
What can be seen here
is that the devaluation of the father by the mother would tend to cause this
edifice to collapse. If the mother does not admire the father, if she engages
the son with the fullness of her emotionality into this project of devaluation,
the son will not be able to project an image of himself
that would enable him to see himself as equal to the powerful figure of the
mother. He will be not be able to order his life with
a prospect for independent, valued identity. He will be able to retain the
fantasy of fusion with the primordial mother, but not without the experience of
that condition as rendering him totally dependent and swallowing him up.
Indeed, her bringing him into this devaluation project would tend to reinforce
that fantasy of being rendered dependent and being swallowed up, since that is
exactly what has happened.
If, in addition, she
holds the father responsible for her lack of fulfillment, and implicitly makes
the son responsible for the reinforcement of her grandiose idea of herself, she
will have made the son's independence from her into an act of abandonment, an
injury to her, the son's only connection and hope. He must, therefore, as the
bedrock of whatever identity he can have, follow her lead, not move from her project, never even question her claim that, were it not for
the father, her life, and their relationship, would have been perfect. In all
of this, he relinquishes any possibility he has of an emotional life as a competent
male adult, substituting instead the idea that male
adulthood is the root of his problem. No wonder he is alienated.
What we see here are
the psychodynamics that underlie the alienated/ postmodern worldview. Nothing
good can be said about the father or his works, since that would involve a
betrayal of the mother. Thus the social forms in which more socialized
individuals transact their identities must be seen as artificial. They must be
denigrated and "deconstructed."
No capacity to project
an image of a valued self into the future means that the metric of one's life
can be based only on one's experiences of the moment. These are, of course,
volatile. From this would arise the idea that people only deceive themselves
into thinking they have some idea of an objective "truth." Since
one's experiences of the moment are the only reality one can acknowledge, any
blockage of them, any interference with their free expression, would be seen as
an intolerable act of oppression. Resistance to this oppression would be
experienced as an identify one could legitimately
have; it would be hard to think of any other. Commitment would be impossible
since commitment always means an acceptance of limitation. In the absence of
any possible goal that would justify the acceptance of limitation, commitment
could only be seen as the internalization of oppression. Value in the world
would have to consist in the freely given love of one's authentic self, as
defined by one's feelings of the moment, a fusion that only the mother's love
for the child could approximate. Any limited acceptance by a specific other
would be experienced in the context of the fact that the concrete relationships
one has had have been devastating. Only the fantasy of relationship,
relationship in purity, could be allowed.
The lack of engagement
with others in social forms or relationships means that the self is always
experienced as isolated, marginal, ephemeral. It
cannot connect itself with any others or any thing. This would be believed to
be true for others as well as for oneself, even though
they deny it. Any connection, therefore, would be seen as only a subjugation
brought about by brute force. Those who seem to experience such connection
would be seen as covering over that brutality by a fantasy of how wonderful the
brute is and how much he deserves to be loved. In this process of covering
over, the voices of the dominated and oppressed, the discourses which express
why they should be loved, are suppressed and silenced.
Competition, aggressiveness, one would believe, are to
be spurned. All they do is establish such dominance. But there is nothing of
value that could legitimate the supremacy of any one over anyone else. All that
could possibly be of value was what previously was, fusion with the perfect mother
who loved one exactly as one was. That was a perfect world, one would suppose.
The father would be seen as the one who destroyed it. "And he wants to be
loved for that?" the alienated would say. "Screw him, his sex, his
discourses, and his ways. Let us reject him and turn to the mother. Undefiled
by the father, she will give us everything we need and want."
As we have described
this matter, the Sin of the Father has been explained away. In this view, there
is no great Sin of the Father, but rather the Sin is a construct, primarily of
the mother, to explain her lack of fulfillment. The son bought into this
because he had to, or face her rage. And he could not face her rage because his
connection with her gave him the only identity he could have.
Now obviously this
analysis constitutes a very serious accusation. It attacks a whole strain, one might even say the dominant strain, of
contemporary thought. One needs more to accept it than what has been given.
Specifically, it seems to me, one needs to develop it in three ways. First, one
needs to go more fully into the charge itself, to take it more seriously, to
look for the truth in it before dismissing it. Second, one needs to look at it
from the alternative point of view. What had the mother to say about all of this. The third charge, which in the end I will accept, is
that the account here has been excessively reductionistic.
Surely postmodernism represents more than the expression of this peculiar
family configuration. Surely there is something taking place at a deeper level.
In order to develop my
claim, then, I will look first at the substance of the charge: what did the
father actually do that might properly have resulted
in this denigration. This will involve taking a look at the purported sinner
himself: the corporation man. Second, I will look at the matter from the other
point of view, from the point of view of the mother. It turns out that she has
been very well spoken for in a book which gave rise to contemporary feminism, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. What we shall see there is the same landscape I
have already described. Finally, I will try to place this family drama in
broader perspective, attempting to show how broader social forces are playing
themselves out through this configuration.
The
sin of the corporation man
In this section I want
to examine the charge against the father. As the alienated student saw it, and
here he joins the disdain of the mother, the father's sins were threefold.
First, he was a sell-out, a phony, a man not to be admired. Second, he
abandoned the family, removing himself physically and psychologically. Third,
he was responsible for the limitations imposed on the mother, which were
reflected in her terrible unhappiness. About the third charge, I will respond in
the section on Friedan. About the first two, my
argument will be that, while there is a great deal of truth to these charges,
they do not add up to the attack upon the patriarch. The reason is that the
corporation man, the phony, the absent father, was no hypermasculine
macho man who suppressed and dominated everyone else. On the contrary, he was a
strictly androgynous guy.
The hypermasculine macho man, as an ideological construct, had
long since ceased to exist by the time the corporation man sold out. He was the
product of social forces that were, not one, but two generations back from the
forces that molded the fathers of the alienated students. As Bendix (1956) has argued, Spencerian
Social Darwinism, the ideology that within corporate organization corresponded
to the macho man model, had given way by the 20s to the model of the Taylorite "scientific manager" who subordinated
his individuality and arbitrary authority to impersonal methods. These
methods defined his own job as well as it did the jobs of those under him. It
is still possible to see patriarchy in this, and certainly the Foucauldian critique of discipline, with its emphasis on
the subordination of the self to an internalized system of abstract rules
(Foucault, 1979), refers to this form of organization. But it is certainly
worth noting that the emphasis Taylor and his followers placed on the common
good and on the idea of finding the appropriate job for each individual worker
represented positive valuations both of community and diversity that the
patriarch is supposed, by the postmodernists, to lack. Again, along with the
involvement of the industrial psychologists who were
to assist in the alignment of individual workers and jobs came an understanding
that workers had attitudes and feelings, betokening a surprising sensitivity on
the part of the supposedly heartless patriarch.
But the idea of
patriarchy becomes attenuated to the breaking point as management ideology
shifts toward the "human relations" model, the model which dominated
managerial ideology at the time the fathers of Keniston's
alienated students were "selling out" (Bendix,
1956). For the ideal manager in the human relations model was a character who
was striking in his adrogyny.
The model of the
worker that formed the center of the human relations movement was of an
individual built out of sentiments, a subject rather than an object. The ideal
manager was a person who held "Theory Y,"
rather than "Theory X"; who believed that work could and should be
motivated through those sentiments, rather than through external control
(McGregor, 1960).
For Mayo, the central
principle of worker motivation was "the desire to stand well with one's
fellows, the so-called human instinct of association" (Mayo, cited in Bendix, 1956: 313). The art of management required the
engagement of these desires with the organization's tasks:
Mayo's view of the
managerial task may be defined as the endeavor to provide an organizational
environment in which employees can fulfill their "eager human desire for
cooperative activity." The major objective of management is to foster
cooperative teamwork among its employees. (Bendix:
317)
It thus required a sensitivity to sentiment and an understanding of its logic
(Roethlisberger, 1943). If we may follow authors like
Gilligan (1982) in the presumption that sensitivity, concern for connection,
interdependence, belonging, and so on are feminine characteristics, there is no
way of denying that the ideal model of the manager in the human relations
approach had a highly developed feminine side.
Nor
would it be correct to assume that human relations ideology was in any way
characteristic only of a fringe movement within a generally patriarchal
management caste.
On the contrary, it was quite broadly based, as Bendix
illustrates with a passage from a 1953 Fortune
magazine description of the General Electric training program:
If the task of the
manager is not work so much as the managing of other
people's work, it follows that getting along with people is far and away the most
important skill of all. (P.320)
Indeed, even the broad
emphasis in the "scientific" literature of the time on such qualities
as "consideration" and "socio-emotional orientation" (e.g.
Fleishman, Harris and Burt, 1955) reveal the importance placed at the time on
the "feminine" side of the personality. One might add that this
literature was so inconclusive (e.g. Korman, 1960)
that it is impossible to disregard the claim that it was driven more by
ideology than by science.
The Man in the Gray
Flannel Suit
In the following
scene, Tom Rath, the book's protagonist, visits the
apartment of Ralph Hopkins, head of the United Broadcasting Company, for whom Rath has been hired to write a speech. Note the femininity
of
The door was opened
almost immediately by Hopkins himself. He was smiling and looked more affable
than ever: "Come in!" he said. "So nice of you
to come!"...
"Won't you sit
down?
"Anything. What are you having?"
"That'll be
fine."
"Just sit down
and make yourself comfortable. Bill Ogden will be along any minute."
Tom sat in a small,
hard leather chair.
According to Bendix, the human relations approach to management arose
from the increasing size and complexity of bureaucratic organizations. These
led to the necessity that discretion had to be exercised widely within the
corporation. Work, therefore, could not be done strictly on the basis of
mechanical performance of strictly physical tasks. It needed to have more
meaning than that. It needed to have, in other words, a place within a directly
experienced emotional nexus.
The impact of this
emotionally sophisticated form of management on the subordinate's feeling about
work is indicated by Rath's response to
"Wonderful!"
Tom turned around.
"Marvelous,"
"I'm glad you
like it," Tom said modestly.
"This really sings,"
"It's a second
draft, actually," Tom said. "Mr. Ogden gave me some
suggestions."
The heart of
the thing is just right!"
Sentence by sentence
Tom gulped his drink
and excused himself.... He was halfway to Grand Central Station before he fully
realized that Ogden and Hopkins had simply told him the same thing in two
different ways: to rewrite the speech. In spite of this,
The important point
here is that the traditional differentiation between the roles of the father
and mother, based on the separation between engaging indifferent reality on one
hand, and emotional expression on the other, could not be maintained in these
organizations. The organization had to be reconstituted as a mother, and the
manager's job became this process of reconstitution. For this, he had to
develop his feminine side.
Mayo understood,
however, that the manager could not simply express his emotions. The manager,
as part of his job, had to express an emotionality in
accordance with what was required within the situation. But there would be no
reason in the world to expect that the manager's emotional makeup would accord
with the organization's necessities. Thus, while his job was to create a world
that others took as warm and caring, his own emotions
had to be very tightly controlled. Thus:
Mayo was emphatic in
demanding that the elite control its sentiments, develop logical thinking, and
hence master the "human-social facts." …Mayo
made short shrift of the invidious distinction between the real wants of workers
and the ideal qualities of employers.... He saw the individuals in both groups
as creatures of sentiment and nonlogical thinking.
The difference between them consisted simply in the capacity of
an administrative elite to engage in logical thinking, to be independent
from social routines, to free themselves from emotional involvement in order to
"assess and handle the concrete difficulties of human collaboration."
(Bendix: 315-6)
Take these together.
The job of the manager is to create an atmosphere of warmth and caring, an
atmosphere in which others feel as if others feel warmly toward them and care
about them. But this creation is not supposed to reflect the spontaneous
feelings of the manager; it is supposed to be part of a drama, a display of feeling
that is under conscious control. One could not, returning to the charge of the
alienated students, have a better definition of "phony" than that.
Push this a bit
farther and one can also see how the center of the manager's emotional life may
have shifted from the family to the corporation. Consider, in this respect,
that the manager was human, too. He needed connection, caring and warmth as
much as any other employee. But the world he lived in was quite the opposite.
By virtue of the very fact that he had the function of creating an emotional
nexus that did not express his own feelings, he and his feelings were excluded
from, forbidden in, the world he created. The richer the
world of his creation, the colder his own life. He had to know that he
was a phony. Torn in half as he was, how could he live with himself? At the
same time, his job was the economic mainstay of his family. He could not simply
abandon it.
Under the
circumstances, it is not surprising that the person would defend himself
through a fantasy in which he would be unified with his feelings within the
context of the work organization. Within this fantasy, elevation in the
hierarchy, which would correspond to setting one's own agenda, rather than
receiving one's cues for the appropriate emotional displays from superiors,
would permit the individual to find a place in the organization that would
permit him to express his spontaneous feelings. To be sure, at any level of the
organization, this would not happen. But the fantasy could still be maintained
by projecting its realization to a higher level. In this way, the manager could
live with the wound in his identity by conceiving it as temporary, to be healed
at some time in the future (Schwartz, 1990).
Tom Rath put the matter this way:
The thing to remember
is this, he thought:
Returning to the
question of identity, though, notice what this would do to the individual's identity, and to his connections with others. It would
result in him abandoning his commitment to who he
really was at any given moment, and to the connections with concrete others,
replacing them with a commitment to a fantasy identity, and fantasized
relationship, which would be realized at a later date. In this way, the center
of the individual's life , the meaning of his
activity, would shift toward what he had to do to climb up the hierarchy and
realize this fantasy, and away from the concrete life he lived in the context
of his family. He would have abandoned his family in the way that his wife and
his alienated son charged. Thus, Ralph Hopkins, the master of the appropriate
emotional gesture, the genius at the display of concern, lived a monastic life
apart from his family, whose feelings of abandonment were powerful.
Moreover, to the
extent that he would be around, he would not be around in a way that would lead
his family to admire him. Rath understood very well
the abandonment of himself that this would involve and was given a clear
inkling of the loss of admiration that would result. He said to his wife, Betsy:
"There's a
standard operating procedure for this sort of thing," he said. "It's
a little like reading fortunes. You make a lot of
highly qualified contradictory statements and keep your eyes on the man's face
to see which one's please him. That way you can feel your way along, and if
you're clever, you can always end up by telling him exactly what he wants to
hear."
"Is that what they do?" Betsy asked. She didn't
laugh. ...
"I think it's a
little sickening," Betsy said bluntly.
"Damn it, have a
sense of humor. What's the matter with you?"
"Nothing's the
matter with me. I'm just interested in knowing the answers to a few questions.
What do you really think of that speech?"
"I think it's
terrible," Tom said. "My business education, you see, is not complete.
In a few years I'll be able to suspend judgment entirely until I learn what
... "You're
angry with me," he said. "Can't you take a joke?"
"I don't think
you were joking."
"Of course I
was. I was knocking myself out with humor."
"What are you
going to tell
"I don't know.
Why's that so important all of a sudden?"
She put the kettle on
the stove and turned toward him suddenly. "I didn't like the look of you
sitting there in that big chair talking so damn smugly and cynically!" she
said. "You looked disgusting! You looked like just the kind of guy you
always used to hate. The guy with all the answers. The guy who has no respect for himself or anyone else."
"What do you
want me to do?" he asked quietly. "Do you want me to go in there
tomorrow and tell
"I don't care
what you tell him, but I don't like the idea of your becoming a cheap cynical
yes-man and being so self-satisfied and analytical about it. You never used to
be like that." (185-6)
In
concluding this section, then. It now seems possible to understand the disdain and anger
the alienated son and his mother felt toward the corporation man. He was indeed
a phony and he had abandoned the family. But we can also understand the
development of the facets of his character which the family found
objectionable. And we can see that, whatever his sins, there was nothing
specifically male gendered about them. The corporation man was not the
patriarch. His sins were simply not the Sins of the Father.
The
Feminine Mystique and the Primordial Mother
If the sins of the
corporation man, serious as they were, were not the Sin of the Father, we are
left only with the final element of the charge against him -- that he prevented
the fulfillment of his wife. The question then becomes, what did
this charge mean to his wife, his accuser. What was going on with the
suburban housewife of the time that led her to feel unfulfilled and led that
feeling to develop into the attack against the patriarch? Staying within the
literature of the period, we are fortunate to have the original material that
makes that case, the enormously influential book The Feminine Mystique
by Betty Friedan (1962).
Friedan, following a general recognition
of the time, observed that the middle class American housewives of the period
were experiencing a deep and serious unhappiness and discontent. This unhappiness
was in sharp contrast with social expectations, according to which the
housewife should have been perfectly fulfilled and ecstatic. Instead, she
suffered from what Friedan called "the problem
that has no name."
According to Friedan, the "problem that has no name" was
occasioned by the housewife being trapped by the "feminine mystique,"
which Friedan defined this way:
The feminine mystique
says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the
fulfillment of their own femininity. It says that the greatest mistake of
Western culture, through most of its history, has been the undervaluation of
this femininity. It says this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and
close to the creation and origin of life that man-made science may never be
able to understand it. But however special and different, it is in no way
inferior to the nature of man; it may even in certain respects be superior. The
mistake, says the mystique, the root of women's troubles in the past is that
women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own
nature, which can find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination,
and nurturing maternal love. (43)
Now this feminine
mystique, pushed off on women by such forces as the male editors of women's
magazines, psychoanalysis, functionalist sociology, advertising, sex-directed
educators, and even turncoats such as Margaret Mead,
gives to American women ... the old
image: "Occupation: housewife." The new mystique makes the
housewife-mothers, who never had a chance to be anything else, the model for
all women; it presupposes that history has reached a final and glorious end in
the here and now, as far as women are concerned. Beneath the sophisticated
trappings, it simply makes certain concrete, finite, domestic aspects of
feminine existence -- as it was lived by women whose lives were confined, by
necessity, to cooking, cleaning, washing, bearing children -- into a religion,
a pattern by which all women must now live or deny their femininity. (43)
The problem that has
no name showed up at this point because these women, educated as well as men,
found that the life of the housewife, though perfected in its own terms,
sharply curtailed the possibilities for the development of the talents that
they had cultivated and the gifts they had to offer. The problem without a name
was the feeling of stultification, of an unfulfilled need for growth:
It is my thesis that
the core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity
-- a stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine
mystique... It is my thesis that as Victorian culture did not permit women to
accept or gratify their basic sexual needs, our culture does not permit women
to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities
as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role. (77)
To begin the analysis
of Friedan, it is first necessary to observe that her
perspective on the situation of the housewife is in perfect concordance with
the theory I have sketched so far. Recall that the sexual division of labor
discussed before had the premise that the male would engage external reality,
pushing it away, so to speak, so that the free play of emotionality, as
represented by the female, could have its safe and unrestrained operation in
the home. This is the situation that Friedan
confronts from the other side.
External reality, for
the housewife, had indeed been pushed away. There was nothing that she had to
do, nothing she had to see as a constraint. All she had to do was express her
feminine essence, to permit the free flow of desire and spontaneity. The
problem was, and who could have foreseen it, that the freedom she had to
express herself spontaneously resulted in torment for she had no self to be.
The point is that the self, as a construction, is defined by contrast with what
is not the self. Take away what is not the self, and the contrast with the
not-self is lost. Take away the not-self, therefore, and the self disappears
along with it.
Just what was this
problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to
express it? Sometimes a woman would say "I feel empty somehow ...
incomplete." Or she would say, "I feel as if I don't exist. (20)
...by choosing
femininity over the painful growth to full identity, by never achieving the
hard core of self that comes not from fantasy but from mastering reality, these
girls are doomed to suffer ultimately that bored, diffuse feeling of
purposelessness, non-existence, non-involvement with the world that can be
called anomie, or lack of identity, or merely felt as the problem that
has no name. (181)
This was the
situation within which the housewife found herself. It was a condition drained
of meaningful activity, of sense, of purpose. The only activities open to her
were those that, given the context of her own developed understanding, could
only seem empty rituals. As Friedan
says: "When a woman tries to put the problem into words, she often merely
describes the daily life she leads." (30)
Indeed, the problem
was even worse than that, for the self, in Freud's terms the ego,
is what provides a framework for the organization of our activity. It
structures our experience and gives a direction to our desire. Without it, our
desire is experienced only as formless excitation. But this is the condition
that Freud (1895/ 1962) originally described as the cause of anxiety! What was
sought, what it was thought would be created, was a rich and full self which
could express its love. This love would structure life at home. What was in
fact created was an undefined self whose affective experience consisted, not of
love, but of anxiety. It created no structure, but only anomie. They thought
they were building paradise. It turned out to be hell.
Friedan's solution for the problem was that
women's roles needed to be changed, and with that needed to be changed the
gendered division of labor. The idea that men would go out and engage reality,
leaving women to express emotionality within the home, had led to an unbearably
painful stultification. The solution had to be the creation of the possibility,
even the necessity, of growth. The separation of women from reality needed to
be undone. Women needed careers which would permit them to engage reality at
the limits of their capacities and talents.
Returning to our
search for the origins of the attack against the father, we can see that parts
of its roots are here. The alienated student and his mother were united in
their disdain for the father. He saw his role as going out and engaging
reality, attenuating its effects within the family so that emotion could reign
there. But this meant that she would be excluded from engagement with reality
and therefore of the possibility of growth. This left her in exquisite misery.
He expected to be appreciated and admired for performing this role, and that
appreciation and admiration were the root of meaning for him. But he was not
appreciated and admired, and we can see why. He had left her in an absolutely
intolerable position. What was she supposed to appreciate him for? But if her
appreciation was the touchstone of the whole program of meaning for them, in
the absence of her appreciation, how could she admire him? But if she did not
admire him, how could he be emulable? And from this
denial of emulability, postmodernism, the uncommitted
alienated student , as we have seen, would follow.
Thus:
strange new problems are being reported
in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving
them around, helping them with their homework -- an inability to endure pain or
discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom
with life. Educators are increasingly uneasy about the dependence, the lack of
self-reliance, of the boys and girls who are entering college today: "We
fight a continual battle to make our students assume manhood," said a
But, returning more
fully to the idea of the Sin of the Father, we can see that there is a problem with
this. For even if we assume that the sexual division of labor deprived the wife
of her growth, and even if we assume that the father got the better part of the
deal here, there is still no basis here for denying the value of his works. It
is worthwhile noting that Friedan does not make such
a denial. On the contrary, she values his achievements. And, in fact, she could
not devalue them without undermining her whole program. For her claim was that
women have been denied the opportunity to do something constructive with their
talents, a point that she makes by contrasting women with men, who have had the
opportunity to do something constructive..
Consider, for example,
this argument from Maslow:
Even the need for
self-respect, for self-esteem and for the esteem of others -- "the desire
for strength, for achievement, for adequacy, for mastery and competence, for
confidence in the face of the world, and for independence and freedom" --
is not clearly recognized for women. But certainly the thwarting of the need
for self-esteem, which produces feelings of inferiority, of weakness, and of
helplessness in man, can have the same effect on woman. Self-esteem in
woman, as well as in man, can only be based on real capacity, competence and
achievement; on deserved respect from others rather than unwarranted adulation.
(315, emphasis added)
Thus, deny that men
have done something worthwhile and the claim that women have been deprived of
the opportunity to do likewise falls apart.
In addition to this
problem there is a difficulty that arises within Friedan's
analysis itself. It is the apparent passivity of women, their willingness to be
swept up by the feminine mystique, to yield to it easily and without
resistance. For, as Friedan describes it, it is hard
to see the source of its attractiveness.
Thus:
sexual passivity,
male domination ... [the feminine mystique] makes certain concrete, finite,
domestic aspects of feminine existence -- as it was lived by women whose lives
were confined, by necessity, to cooking, cleaning, washing, bearing children --
into a religion, a pattern by which all women must now live or deny their
femininity. (43, see above)
That doesn't sound so
great. How could it appeal to anybody? It is not enough to say that the power
of the feminine mystique was overwhelming. Where did it get its power?
Advertisers, for example, may have mobilized the full weight of their
creativity in constructing it, but advertisers do not generally go against the
tide. Nor do university administrators, or magazine editors, or manufacturers.
The idea of them throwing their enterprises behind the creation of a product to
which no one was attracted is hard to believe. The idea that they would succeed
mightily in the process is even more difficult. One could make the claim, of
course, that women are, by nature, passive creatures, weak,
easily swayed and dominated. But that is not exactly a claim that Friedan, or I, would support.
The solution I will
propose provides an answer to both of the problems, disparate as they appear. It
is that the image that appealed, both to men and to women, which drew women
into the suburban nest, was not an image of weakness and triviality, it was in
fact the most powerful image in the psyche. It was an image
of a person complete unto herself, of infinite love, infinite goodness,
and at the same time omnipotent in the sense that her boundless love could
provide for the complete fulfillment of all of our needs. The power of the
feminine mystique was the power of the primordial mother.
The idea of the
castrating mother was a staple of Friedan's time.
Typically, she notes, it was projected onto those women who abandoned their
"feminine" role and competed with men. But, Friedan
argues, it was not the women who sought professional careers who were responsible
for a lack of masculinity among their sons, it was the ones who stayed at home,
those whose occupation was housewife. This is a point that parallels Keniston's account. Keniston's
alienated students' mothers were housewives who had given up their careers.
Yet the image their
alienated sons had of them of them is far from the image of the weak, passive,
dependent creature that such women were supposed to have become. For these
young men, the mother was the dominant person in the household. They were dominant
not only over the sons, but especially over the fathers. From what could this
strength have been derived? It can be explained on the grounds of an identification with the primordial mother, whose judgment
of worth was the keystone of these men's sense of meaning, and who therefore
had the power to render their lives meaningless by withholding that judgment.
One cannot imagine a greater power.
Again, Friedan seems perplexed that few of the housewives of her
time took the route of professional activity out of their misery. They could
engage in amateur activity with no difficulty.
It is the jump from
amateur to professional that is often hardest for a woman on her way out of the
trap. But even if a woman does not have to work to eat, she can find identity
only in work that is of real value to society -- work for which, usually, our
society pays. Being paid is, of course, more than a reward -- it implies a
definite commitment. For fear of that commitment, hundreds of able, educated
suburban housewives today fool themselves about the writer or actress they
might have been, or dabble at art or music in the dilettante's limbo of
"self-enrichment," .... These are also ways of evading growth.
(346, emphasis added)
Friedan attributes this fear of
commitment to the feminine mystique. The assumption that the feminine mystique
was the appeal of the primordial mother leads to perfect agreement on this
point, but provides a different slant. Commitment means doing what one has to
do, rather than what one wants to do. It means submission and subordination to
an external agenda. It means the acceptance of limitation. It necessarily
involves a descent from the fantasy of perfection and freedom that the
primitive mother involves. Refusal of commitment is understandable if one
understands the fantasy of freedom that it is preserving.
Again, if the feminine
mystique is the power of the primordial mother, we can understand the denial of
the value of men's works. The fantasy of perfection inherent in the primordial
mother would cause the value of men's works, limited as they are, to fare badly
by comparison. Whatever the status, the prestige of the father, they would be
seen as undeserved. Whatever his accomplishments, they would be seen as
insufficient. Did he bring home income for the family? He did not bring home
enough.
Under the
circumstances, returning to our earlier exploration, we can better understand
why he did not spend very much time at home. We find that we are also better
able to understand the response of the alienated son. This mother was larger
than life, so to speak, and her power to enrich the son's sense of importance
was overwhelming. But he could only gain that sense by maintaining and feeding
back to his mother that sense of omnipotence. What he was definitively barred
from doing was admiring his father, since denying the worth of the father was a
part of the very structure of the mother's image of herself and her condition.
The postmodern consciousness, as we have seen would follow.
But we are still not at
the end of our quest, because there are still two questions we have not
answered. First, we have found again the source of the alienation of the son,
and hence of the structure of postmodern consciousness. But we cannot, as yet,
understand its strength. Thus, the alienated son, while his consciousness
reflects postmodernism, was not in a condition to push it. His was, after all,
an alienated consciousness: his victory in the Oedipal
struggle was pyrrhic, as he well knew. He was filled with longing and loss.
Postmodernism, on the other hand, as we may see from the dominance it has
attained in so many academic disciplines, has been an aggressively active
force. There has been tremendous power behind it. Where has this power come
from? The second question is still the original one. What was the Sin of the
Father? For, again, the image of the father here is weak, and not to be
admired, but if there is in this very little capacity for great good, there is
also very little capacity for great evil. How could this puny creature commit
the Sin of the Father?
The
power of the daughter
As before, these two
questions may be answered on the basis of the same recognition. This
recognition brings to focus the one element of this familial stew that we have
not touched on at all. This family had not only sons, but daughters. And it
was, as I will argue, the daughters who inherited the power of this
configuration, and hold it to this day. The daughter in this dysfunctional
ménage is the power behind postmodernism, seen as a political force.
The son was weak
because he could not develop power through identification with a valued father.
Yet his identification with his powerful mother, for the obvious reasons, had
to be partial and incomplete. No such strictures applied to the daughter. She
did not have to admire the father in order to gain strength. She could identify
with the awesome power of the primordial mother. And she could adopt the
mother's denigration of the father, not losing strength in the bargain, as the
son did, but gaining it because it would give her a way of understanding why
her mother was both so powerful and so miserable.
And this finally gives
us an answer to our question of the origin of the Sin of the Father. The
primordial mother, in addition to being omnipotent, is also the fount of all
goodness. She is, essentially, goodness herself -- the original goddess, as
some might say (Eisler, 1987). If someone were to
identify with her, and yet find limitation and anxiety in her life, an
explanation would be required that would do justice to this in moral terms. The
imputation of badness would serve very nicely here. And the imputation of
badness would tend to be commensurate with the magnitude of the goodness it
prevailed against. Perfect goodness would draw out, then, an imputation of
perfect badness to explain its limitation. And this, finally, takes us to a
point where we can understand the Sin of the Father. His sin was everything he
ever did, or ever could do, because it would all bring with it the evil that emanated
from him as the very meaning of who he was. And he was the incarnation of
perfect evil, the devil. A good life, indeed a perfect life could be lived,
therefore, in the service of the destruction of his power. If that happened the power of the primordial mother, as represented
now by the daughters, could come into its own, creating a perfect world.
What would arise from
all of this would be a tremendous feeling of potency on the part of the
daughter. Within this configuration we can also see that the daughter would
have power over the son, for whom over-dependency on the female was the
defining characteristic of the psychological framework. That tells us what we
need to know about the power of postmodernism.
Women's
studies and the feminine mystique: The ideology of the daughters
There is an element of
this analysis that bears further elaboration. I have argued that the feminine
mystique was the power of the primordial mother. I have further argued that the
daughter of the suburban housewife identified with her mother's primordial
power, and took it as her life's meaning and mission to destroy her father's
power, substituting the expression of her self. The implication of this,
though, is that the daughter identified with the feminine mystique. Yet,
clearly enough, being a suburban housewife is the last thing in the world that
these daughters want to do. How do we account for this apparent contradiction?
The contradiction is
accounted for by the fact that the daughters brought the feminine mystique with
them, and maintain it as the fundament of their ideology and practice. We see
this most directly in the areas of theory and practice over which they have the
most control: feminist pedagogy and, especially, women's studies programs in
the university. Women's studies is the feminine
mystique, taken out of the family and turned toward the world. Add the
attribution that men are the reason the feminine mystique has not yet made the
world perfect and you have the whole program.
Recall in this
connection Friedan's formulation:
The feminine mystique
says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the
fulfillment of their own femininity. (43)
And compare it to
formulations of how the expression of the female, typically understood as nurturant, caring, and non-hierarchical will be inherently
superior to the work that is done by men, in a wide range of fields. Thus, in
the field of governance, Catherine MacKinnon (1989), who defines feminism as
"the theory of women's point of view" (120) says:
Its project is to
uncover and claim as valid the experience of women...
This defines the task
of feminism not only because male domination is perhaps the most pervasive and
tenacious system of power in history, but because it is metaphysically nearly
perfect. Its point of view is the standard for point-of-viewlessness,
its particularity the meaning of universality. Its force is exercised as
consent, its authority as participation, its supremacy as the paradigm of
order, its control as the definition of legitimacy. (116-7)
Again, in science, we
have this from Sandra Harding (1986), approvingly presenting the view of Nancy Hartsock:
A feminist
epistemological standpoint is an interested social location
("interested" in the sense of "engaged," not
"biased"), the conditions for which bestow upon its occupants
scientific and epistemic advantage. The subjugation of women's sensuous,
concrete, relational activity permits women to grasp aspects of nature and
social life that are not accessible to inquiries grounded in men's
characteristic activities. The vision based on men's activities is both partial and perverse -- "perverse" because it
systematically reverses the proper order of things: it substitutes abstract for
concrete reality; for example, it makes death-risking rather than the
reproduction of our species form of life the paradigmatically human activity.
(148)
One could go on from
there to many other fields, such as administration (Ferguson, 1984), music (McClary, 1991) and even logic (Nye, 1990). In all of this
one can see the idealization of the primordial mother. To be sure, in many of
these cases, it is maintained that the feminine attributes, so called, are
"socially constructed" rather than "essential." Nonetheless,
it is uniformly assumed that when women gain power the new social arrangements
they create will retain the virtues of women, even though an entirely different
set of social arrangements would presumably have "socially
constructed" gender entirely differently. This suggests that the mythology
of the primordial mother goes a great deal deeper than feminist thought about
social construction. An aspect of this is revealed by Patai
and Koertge (1994), here quoting one of their
sources:
It constantly happens
in class that students argue for social constructionism on the one hand, but
revert to essentialist ideas quite opportunistically. It's as if everything
they dislike about "women" gets dismissed as social construction,
while all the rest is the Real Thing.
And, by contrast,
As for men, most
everything about them is not socially constructed, since that would, in some
sense, let them off the hook, so men get heavy doses of essentialist attributes
while the students imagine they're espousing a straight constructionist line of
analysis.
Finally one may point
to the characteristics of the feminist classroom itself. Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, (1994), two disillusioned veterans of the feminist
movement, in a devastating critique of Women's Studies programs, observe:
Many feminist
classrooms cultivate an insistence on "feeling," which, on
examination, turns out to be the traditional split between intellect and
emotion recycled, with the former still assigned to men and the latter to
women. (3)
Compare this with Friedan's description of the "home economics"
classroom of the Fifties, in which the feminine mystique was pushed:
There is a pseudotherapeutic air, as the professor listens patiently
to endless self-conscious student speeches about personal feelings
("verbalizing") in the hopes of sparking a "group insight."
(169-70)
And it is worthwhile
noting that Friedan's objection to this:
But though the
functional course is not group therapy, it is certainly an introduction of
opinions and values through manipulation of the students' emotions; and in this
manipulative disguise, it is no longer subject to the critical thinking
demanded in other academic disciplines. (17))
is paralleled precisely by Patai and Koertge's observation
that:
In feminist pedagogy,
the new valorization of women's modes of communication and interaction has led
to the use of sentiment as a tool of coercion. (3)
In this we can see the
core of "political correctness," which is the way in which the
primordial mother exerts her power (Schwartz, 1993, 1996).
The
misery of the daughter
If this were a
detective story, we could stop here. "The daughter did it," we could
say, and that would be the end of the matter. But it is not a detective story.
It is an attempt to understand human beings and therefore, it seems to me, it
should not end until it ends with sympathy.
But how shall we find
sympathy for the daughter? More precisely, and bringing this matter as close to
home as I can manage, my question is how can I find sympathy for her? I find
her narcissism, her self-righteousness, and her rage obnoxious. Her grandiosity
condemns all mortals and their works, but I want to know what good she has
brought. As Simpson (1994) has argued, the connectiveness
out of which her bounty is supposed to come is not connection to anything real,
not to other concrete human beings, but is abstract and empty. She is a fantasy
to herself and she connects only to fantasy. Her bounty has been a fantasy as
well.
Yet in this
distressing picture there is a human being who can be engaged. I can engage
with her in her misery, for she is a deeply, desperately unhappy person. I can
see this in the very rage which is so repellant to me. For if it is
disagreeable to me, imagine how it feels to her. As with all
rage, it must tear her up inside. And if she is deeply unconnected to
others, if she has allies, perhaps, but not friends, imagine how lonely she is.
If the correlate of her grandiosity has to be infinite and uncompromising love,
imagine how bitterly she must feel the ineluctible
indifference of the world.
Reflecting on this, it
seems to me that, of the damaged creatures in the modern family, her wound is
the most painful. It is the most painful because she must have the most
difficult time healing it. To heal it, she will have to find common ground with
mortal, limited, creatures, capable of sin -- creatures like me, for example.
Yet she bears from her relationship with her mother the premise of being
infinite and divine. If the son has a hard time separating from this
overwhelming mother, think how hard it has to be for her.
Yet she must separate,
if her misery is not simply to get worse. She must realistically take the
measure of her mother if she is going to come to a realistic appreciation of
her father. And unless she can value the father and his work, she will not be
able to learn what he has to teach, nor be able to emotionally engage herself
in the work that she inherits from him. That work, then, will have to seem
empty, sterile, and meaningless. Again, missing its meaning and unable to take
her predecessor as a model, she is likely to fail at it, and not understand why
she has failed. Her rage is likely only to increase.
There is an
interesting aspect of this that is worthy of mention. As we saw in the
discussion of the corporate man, what made it possible for him to emotionally
engage his work was the development of his feminine side.
It follows from this that, for the daughter, the necessary identification with
the father will have to proceed through a recognition
of this feminine side. This suggests the striking irony that what the daughter
needs to find and accept in the father is -- herself.
No wonder she finds it so difficult.
At any rate, I can
have compassion for the difficulty of her journey, whether in any individual
case she has begun it or not. She is, after all, my sister.
Conclusion