On Men: Masculinity in Crisis by Anthony Clare
262pp, Chatto & Windus, £17.99
Buy it at BOL
The healing of the mind through love is what religion and psychiatry both aspire to. Though the elaborate, uneasy ruminations of Professor Anthony Clare's On Men: Masculinity in Crisis are couched in the secular language of the consulting room, the book's basic direction is moral, almost evangelical. It's an appeal for calm in an apocalyptic world; polemic arguing for an end to polemic, or at least to a long era of sexual terrorism and intractable self-interest between men and women.
Clare has always been a conciliator and a populist. Temperamentally, he seems genuinely reluctant to offend, unwilling to browbeat or assert without being completely secure in his facts - the book's admirable opening sentence, "As I get older and perhaps wiser, I realise more and more what I do not know", is very characteristic. The emollient intimacies of his long-running series In the Psychiatrist's Chair have been perfect for Radio 4, bridging the gap between the easygoing celebrity interview and something much less flirtatious and more unsettling.
To his detractors, there's something a bit Delia Smith about Clare - a bit limelight-hungry and ingratiating. His gift is to be exquisitely sympathetic, fluently thoughtful, not confrontational or revelatory or profound. What he does makes excellent and often compulsive listening, but it's a long way from the disturbing, strenuous, driven, ground-breaking, quasi-medicine-cum-quasi-magic of the great psychiatric thinkers such as Freud, Jung, Adler or Klein.
That there's a tougher, more thoroughgoing and aggressive wisdom underpinning Clare's philosophy is obvious almost at once on reading On Men . Clare describes a mood of apparently deepening sexual mistrust, in which women are enjoying a process of political and biological emancipation. Meanwhile men, emasculated by the science that allows women to conceive children without them, find themselves increasingly attacked, marginalised and psychically wounded. Yet the crisis the book talks of isn't really one of masculinity but one of faith, or lack of it. Ultimately, as Clare sees it, the problem for the world isn't old-fashioned phallic masculinity or the consequences of male violence, arrogance and intimidation, but something simpler and deeper and which crosses the sexual barrier - hatred itself.
It's this informing perception that lifts his theme above fashionable panic. Much of Clare's knottily detailed analysis - with its careful deployment of statistics, its sense of tiptoeing across a minefield - is an attempt to prove, in the face of what he regards as an inherently threatening gender-politicised feminist climate, that certain fairly basic, commonsensical things are really true. That divorce isn't necessarily the best solution for couples at loggerheads, as one-parent apologists have claimed; that children from divorced families tend not to perform as well educationally or emotionally; that the now fashionably redundant father is better present than absent; and that there's an innate psychodynamic weakness in the single-parent family that makes it an unreliable ideal.
Above all, Clare genuinely hates the hatreds that too often pollute the whole troubled area. Behind his book lies the keen, wounded perception that the conflicts of gender politics - the entrenched, impacted animosities which pile up on both sides - are something essentially destructive. These hatreds, whether rooted in gender, sexual orientation or ideological cause, are little more than psychological strategies to allow groups of people to feel for the "enemy" group a contempt or loathing of which they would be morally ashamed if they applied it to themselves or their associates.
Seeking an accommodation, a healing therapy of mutual respect capable of resolving these long-entrenched divisions, he argues powerfully against the purely chemical or biological determinism that holds that men are the helpless, testosterone-fuelled prisoners of their genes. Instead, he returns masculinity to its source in the family - to love, mutual respect and the primary creative role that both sexes undertake in the rearing of children.
To some extent the book is a development of Dr Ian Suttie's controversial and progressive 1935 classic, The Origins of Love and Hate , published in the period between the Suffragettes and the Pill when modern radicalism was founded. The book took much of the authoritarian and patriarchal sexual psychopathology out of Freud's theories of individual emotional development, reinterpreting the mother-child relation ship in terms less sternly repressive, and less pessimistic and cynical, than Freud had done.
Suttie thought that the child's primary need was for love, not the gratification of sensory appetite, and that culture and art (which, to Freud, arose from the suppression of the sexual instinct) grew out of the games children play in order to make the transition from mother-dependency to being well integrated and thus successfully separated social beings. To Suttie, the emotional and cultural world we make as adults is a substitute for (and therefore a mirror of) the mother-child relationship. That was our first experience not merely of sensual comfort and fulfilment, but of other more complicated emotional needs - for "company, moral encouragement, attention, protectiveness, leadership". He believed society could achieve psychic health only by becoming more matriarchal. In a memorable phrase that still deserves wider currency, he wanted "the taboo on tenderness" lifted from men, male rearing and education. So, too, does Clare.
One of the attractive features of On Men is how little actual psychiatry it contains. Clare prefers to deal with the sociological implications of masculine behaviour rather than playing guru and claiming some spurious dogmatic pseudo-knowledge of how it originates in the mind. The part-science and part-shamanism of psychiatric thinking has always had its wilfully blind side. Just as in a religious age the workings of chance and organic illness were ascribed to the will of God, so the psychotherapeutic creeds of the last 100 years - which distrust the purely accidental as much as the conventionally religious used to do - make the mind or the psyche conjecturally responsible for everything that the body feels or is obliged to sustain.
We live, as a result, in a stubbornly psychosomatic era, seeing in all our malaise and misfortune some rectifiable dysfunction of our individual selves. Yet, as Clare slowly but relentlessly establishes, part of our trouble is that we look inward too complacently, ignoring too easily the collective cultural conditions that lie mostly beyond the scope of personal therapy.
"We spend money on killing machines and wonder why our youngsters are so aggressive. We insist our children, from the earliest years, familiarise themselves with the intricacies of human biology, yet ensure they learn little or nothing of psychology until their own personalities are distorted beyond correction. And, rather than acknowledge the neglect we have shown towards structures such as marriage and family life, we resort to undermining their importance in the sum of human health and happiness." There's a salutary anger in this, as well as a loathing of dogma and a fine, sane, bristling common sense.
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