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moniwicz's review against another edition
3.0
What do a broscience podcast on hunting, a priestly talk as part of a literary lecture series, and a Jungian psychoanalyst's treatise all have in common?
The first is that I, Monika, happened to listen/watch/read all three of them serendipitously in the space of a week. The second is that all three of them quite independently lamented the loss of real masculine values, fatherly influence, and tribal initiation in the West during the years particularly following the baby boom of our parents.
[I attach both the video and the podcast below, and encourage you to watch particularly the first one if you happen to speak French.]
La voie des hommes - Conférence de l'Abbé Philippe de Maistre
Meat Mafia Podcast - Sacred Hunting Modern Masculinity
The family unit, in the name of freedom and individualism, has crumbled. At the time of writing (1982) Corneau counts 1,307,860 children in France living in single parent families where that one parent is a woman. In Canada about one of every 6 families was the same. There are also many many more emotionally absent fathers. Now there must be many more.
L'abbé de Maistre (above) says that “Elles (females) savent tres bien qui elles sont.” It is males who need the close presence of an imitable father figure and initiation rituals for proper development and self-identification. I wonder if he had read Corneau.
Everyone thinks they know a little about psychoanalysis. Freudian ideas are so founded on explicitly sexual incestuous dreams (oedepus complex etc etc) that it was impossible for them not to become common topics of conversation from teenage years onwards. Corneau is a Jungian devotee and Jung was a contemporary of his germanophone friend.
My conclusion after reading even a bit of this work is that no matter how entertaining it is to read Freud/Jung/Corneau/[insert other] it is unwise to take their works to seriously.
I think it was Plomin (whose book Blueprint I read recently and who really impressed me) brought up the whole Freud thing. He writes:
I did get the feeling that Jung was searching to illustrate his hypothesis with colorful character studies. Each one more dysfunctional than the last. I did begin to wonder if anyone could escape his pathololisation of their personality. Everthing could be traced back to the loss of a father: lack of ambition but also perfectionism; frigidity but also playboy behaviours; thrill seeking and overpoliteness; homosexuality and fear-of-homosexuality. Nothing could not fit.
In all probability the answer is that non-pathology lies in the virtuous compromise. But still. I didn't like this.
There was, howver, one overarching and recurrent problem that these males had; the inability to form any healthy attachment to women. A failure of any sort of intimacy with the opposite sex.According to Corneau this failure could be linked completely back to the lack of balancing strong male character in the household and the problematic overattachment or resentment that festered towards the mother who remained.
My other beef with Corneau is that when he ventures into Domains that are not his own, such as religion and biology, he is downright silly;
“Saint Joseph… participated very little in the active life of his son Jesus”
“Biologists affirm that at the embryonic stage we are all initially female” (he follows that this slippery biological tendency is why masculinity is fragile and therefore must be constantly affirmed.)
Luckily I do not think that these were detractors.
There were elements and moments of this book that give pause; and thinking back it was probably because the stregth of consistency of a result was too much to ignore. Corneau is a clinical psychotherapist, and the sheer number of male patients in whom he sees the same gaping patterns of problem left after the absence of their fathers is too much to ignore. Likewise, when Corneau echoed Phillippe de Maistre echoed The Meat Mafia podcast the inferences became convincing enough from these three divergent sources to become almost scientific. Almost.
The first is that I, Monika, happened to listen/watch/read all three of them serendipitously in the space of a week. The second is that all three of them quite independently lamented the loss of real masculine values, fatherly influence, and tribal initiation in the West during the years particularly following the baby boom of our parents.
[I attach both the video and the podcast below, and encourage you to watch particularly the first one if you happen to speak French.]
La voie des hommes - Conférence de l'Abbé Philippe de Maistre
Meat Mafia Podcast - Sacred Hunting Modern Masculinity
The family unit, in the name of freedom and individualism, has crumbled. At the time of writing (1982) Corneau counts 1,307,860 children in France living in single parent families where that one parent is a woman. In Canada about one of every 6 families was the same. There are also many many more emotionally absent fathers. Now there must be many more.
L'abbé de Maistre (above) says that “Elles (females) savent tres bien qui elles sont.” It is males who need the close presence of an imitable father figure and initiation rituals for proper development and self-identification. I wonder if he had read Corneau.
Everyone thinks they know a little about psychoanalysis. Freudian ideas are so founded on explicitly sexual incestuous dreams (oedepus complex etc etc) that it was impossible for them not to become common topics of conversation from teenage years onwards. Corneau is a Jungian devotee and Jung was a contemporary of his germanophone friend.
My conclusion after reading even a bit of this work is that no matter how entertaining it is to read Freud/Jung/Corneau/[insert other] it is unwise to take their works to seriously.
I think it was Plomin (whose book Blueprint I read recently and who really impressed me) brought up the whole Freud thing. He writes:
Freud thought that parenting is the essential ingredient in a child's development... He wrote persuasively about clinical case studies that supported his ideas, but he provided no real data. When research was done to test his ideas, little support was found for them. The philosopher of science Karl Popper claimed that Freud's theories were presented in a form that made them impossible to disprove, which is the Popperian sin against the first commondment of science that theories be not just testable but falsifiable.
I did get the feeling that Jung was searching to illustrate his hypothesis with colorful character studies. Each one more dysfunctional than the last. I did begin to wonder if anyone could escape his pathololisation of their personality. Everthing could be traced back to the loss of a father: lack of ambition but also perfectionism; frigidity but also playboy behaviours; thrill seeking and overpoliteness; homosexuality and fear-of-homosexuality. Nothing could not fit.
In all probability the answer is that non-pathology lies in the virtuous compromise. But still. I didn't like this.
There was, howver, one overarching and recurrent problem that these males had; the inability to form any healthy attachment to women. A failure of any sort of intimacy with the opposite sex.According to Corneau this failure could be linked completely back to the lack of balancing strong male character in the household and the problematic overattachment or resentment that festered towards the mother who remained.
My other beef with Corneau is that when he ventures into Domains that are not his own, such as religion and biology, he is downright silly;
“Saint Joseph… participated very little in the active life of his son Jesus”
“Biologists affirm that at the embryonic stage we are all initially female” (he follows that this slippery biological tendency is why masculinity is fragile and therefore must be constantly affirmed.)
Luckily I do not think that these were detractors.
There were elements and moments of this book that give pause; and thinking back it was probably because the stregth of consistency of a result was too much to ignore. Corneau is a clinical psychotherapist, and the sheer number of male patients in whom he sees the same gaping patterns of problem left after the absence of their fathers is too much to ignore. Likewise, when Corneau echoed Phillippe de Maistre echoed The Meat Mafia podcast the inferences became convincing enough from these three divergent sources to become almost scientific. Almost.
punchofwishes's review against another edition
challenging
medium-paced
1.5
Read this for a term paper and oh boy was it a doozy. Aside from some outdated and sometimes contradictory statements on a variety of subjects, the longer the book went on the more it devolved into a strange mix of greek mythology, overarching social theory, and psychology in only the broadest of senses. The chapter on Absent Fathers was literally the only one with a few solid points and interesting quotes.
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