Forever Young: Psychoanalysis of man’s deepest anxiety
Ben Barnes was cast in the lead role of the film Dorian Gray. His image of youthful innocence encased in the visage of human beauty seemed to speak to us the absolute truth of one’s early life. That is, the life tainted with whimsy, capricious careless abandon, and spontaneity. The life untainted by time’s cruel hands and life’s tragic losses. Yet, at the same time, this same image represents the one thing most women and men mourn the most; lost youth. That is to say; good health, young beauty, elastic mind, and everything that youthful time period afforded them including the company of those we loved dearly and have lost in death.
For some, this image may evoke feelings of desire and fear of death because it posses them both simultaneously. This is because youth and death are both simultaneously intertwined in the human condition. For some, who are envious and jealous, it will evoke resentment, anger, envy and even hate. This is because it represents both something they desperately desire yet cannot attain.
It is this image of youth that Ben Barnes possess in the film that is so desired and sought out, like so many other images like it. It motivates men and women to risk death in trying to recapture its appearance by taking dangerous new diet drugs whose long term side effects have not been proven and risking death via excessive surgical procedures.
One might ask the question,
“Why are assaults on human flesh so popular today?”
One of the reasons assaults on the female body are unconsciously condoned and even promoted by both sexes are because they are expressions of our deepest anxieties about flesh and the existential terror of being human. Even though the human race has demonstrated remarkable achievements in science, technology and medicine, the most important feature of existence remain out of our control. The assault on the human body to deny it the visage of one’s true age is an attempt to deny the infantile repetition terror of our deepest anxieties. That is, to evacuate feelings of vulnerability, disappointment, and pain that are connected to the maternal object we first came in contact with, and had our first initial experiences with the human condition — the maternal body. Because the implicit memories that laid down our neural pathways in our brains when we were helpless infants, whose lives depended on a capricious woman, all human beings associate the female sex with the uncontrollable and the primitive, with nature and with death.
To quote Lucy Holmes,
Mother represents the infant with his first experience of the human condition of vulnerability, disappointment, and pain. Father represents the world enterprise, a path of liberation from the all-encompassing mother, and this is the basis of our idea that masculine enterprise can save us from our carnality and mortality. We tend to invest all primitive feelings, all fleshly mortality in women, and that is why it is deeply satisfying for both men and women to make projects of controlling the female body.”
We delude ourselves that surgeries and new fad diet drugs will make us immortal. In evacuating the maternal representation from the mind, we create a psychic problem where the mother remains emotionally non-existent. Thus, a defensive stance evolves where men need to shore up this loss by subjugating women in order to replace their non-existent mothers.
This is such a fundamental psychological phenomena we see its silent spectral image in anorexia, fashion design, cosmetic surgery, new drug development, and more recently in wireless electronic assault and torture on the human body. I would like to reiterate that this is such a fundamental psychological concept to psychoanalysis that those things peculiar to time periods (Witch Hunts, Inquisitions, and Genocides) never really disappear or leave us. They only transform into something altogether new. And this is because men and women cannot separate themselves from the infantile repetition terror inside our minds. So we develop new ways to subjugate and control human bodies in order to deal with this fear. Hence, the new development of wireless electronic assaults and torture. Enter the Moscow Signal, Havana Syndrome, and Targeted Individuals.
One might further question,
“Why do women collude with men in terms of their own oppression and assaults?”
The answer lies in the fact that women find it as unconsciously gratifying as men. She cooperates with masculine subjugation of women because if she invests all power in men and male enterprise, she can delude herself that the powerful other will save her from her own mortality.
“Women’s masochism is a search for recognition from an other who is strong enough to bestow recognition. Her sacrifice of authoritative command actually creates his, produces his coherent self in which he can take refuge. In losing her self, she is gaining access to a more powerful one.” (Holmes, 2013)
The almost universal implicit memories we have about fathers are based in the historical fact that men have owned creative production and a monopoly on the ability to wage war on the world which is so indifferent to our well being and survival. Thus, our implicit memories tell us the locus of power, self-control, and rationality lie with our fathers.
Sources:
Jessica Benjamin (1988) “The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem with Domination. New York. Pantheon Books.
Lucy Holmes (2013) “Wrestling with Destiny: The promise of psychoanalysis. New York. Routledge.
