I wish I could recommend this book. We need a book which deals with this whole area and clears up the messes and the misunderstandings. But I am afraid that this one is more confusing than helpful. The basic message is that 'men exist in a permanent state of enmity towards women which they express overtly and covertly, by controlling and dominating them'. It comes out of five years work with violent and abusive men at the London Men's Centre. The author went from being a gestalt therapist to a psychodynamic therapist to a feminist therapist.
It is an extreme book. It sets out the terms of the problem in such a way as to make it virtually impossible to solve. Freud's work is used throughout to show that because men's hatred for women comes from the Oedipus complex, and because women's complementary responses come from the same source, there is no way of solving the problem other than universal psychoanalysis, which the author himself says is out of the question. It is not even clear whether he believes in the efficacy of psychoanalysis, even in the ideal case; he keeps on talking as if he himself has not found any way out. And he says in one place this extraordinary thing:
'Indeed, it is clear to me that society needs men to have unresolved Oedipus complexes; that we continue to live with the fear of the father (the Law). A truly free man would represent a real threat to social organization.'
This does not show any great faith in his own work with men or in his own development as a man.
But the worst thing about this book is the way it is written. It is full of repetitions, digressions and general verbiage: the reader is made to feel quite bludgeoned by hearing the same thing repeated over and over again in slightly different words. Every chapter could be cut by two-thirds or so with advantage. And some of the language is quite appalling in its jargon.
This is not only a book of theory, however; it is also a book of practice, based on much work with men. Here there are some strange contradictions. We are told that the author's programme to stop the violent and abusive behaviour of men who come to him attempts 'to achieve this goal in a time-limited context which does not pretend to touch these deeper levels of functioning but focuses instead on the cognitive aspects, the learned and conscious expectations, attitudes, thoughts, feelings and beliefs about men and women which accompany a batterer's behaviour.' Yet a few pages further on we are told that such programmes cannot work 'for the simple reason that many of these expectations are pre-verbal, even ineffable. At these levels we need to understand the profoundly deep roots of misogyny, and this involves going beyond simple behaviour and cognitive processes'. (p.319)
All in all there is a hopelessness about it which I find quite off-putting. It is as if the author had no real idea of a relationship which could work - that has to wait until the world-wide feminist revolution has taken place. Yet we do know that it is possible to set up enclaves, oases, small areas of happiness, where a man and a woman can genuinely do things for and with each other, and not get caught up in violence and abuse. Like Marcuse before him, he has set up a system in which the Great Refusal is impossible.
John Rowan
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