Just in time for an oedipal/electral valentine's, this book review from The Boston Globe entitled What's infantile sexuality got to do with it? takes a look at a book called Love's Confusions by C.D.C Reeve.
The book appears to be a new exploration of the old familiar idea that we set our patterns for adult romance in infancy and then just get to repeat that same crappy pattern. Over and over.
From the review:
''Love is whatever develops from, and somewhat recapitulates, a child's relationship with his mother." That sounds reductive, but it's not. Infants think as well as feel; and infantile thinking underlies adult thinking, just as infantile sexuality underlies adult sexuality. Somehow -- we don't yet know how, and Reeve's Freudian account, though plausible, is not fully convincing -- an infant forms images, first of itself and then of the outside world. These images are the characters (''inner-baby," ''inner-Mommy") in a drama that takes place in the infant imagination. The plot elements in this drama are the infant's needs and the mother's help and approval. As the plot thickens -- with the mother's occasional disapproval, absence, even neglect, the infant's answering hatred, and eventually the father's competing, threatening presence, as well as new infantile needs (for bodily control, not merely food) -- new characters are added (''bad inner-baby," ''bad inner-Mommy," ''inner-Daddy," etc.), along with new plot twists. The infant's dramaturgy is called ''fantasy"; enumerating its techniques is one main function of psychoanalytic theory.''We are actors," Reeve writes, ''playing roles for actors playing roles for us." The scripts are continually revised, of course, but elements of the primal drama, the original script, keep reappearing.
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Mmm-hmm. Isn't it cheery to realize you were already broken and screwed up before you even learned to walk? And that horrible 3 months you had with so-and-so apparently was destiny, after all. Doomed internal primal drama destiny, true, but if you subscribe to this school of thought, that's what you get. All you get.
Brings to mind an Oscar Wilde line: "The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast."
{curtain}
Hey! The Doggie Diner head has been given a permanent home.
I briefly mentioned the Doggie Dinner head in this blog in one of my older entries entitled "Big Giant Head," although the big giant head from that entry referred to the head of the Goddess of Progress statue that broke off in the 1906 earthquake. I did, though, make a passing reference to the Doggie Diner head, where I noted that there have been a few famous big giant heads in San Francisco history but that the Doggie Diner head was probably the most famous one.
Curiously, the Doggie Diner head, like the Goddess of Progress head, also happened to fall victim to a destructive force of nature. In 2001, a strong windstorm caused the pole the Doggie Diner head had been mounted on to collapse. This sent the big giant head crashing into the street, and its snout was badly damaged in the fall.
Not too surprisingly, the full saga behind the Doggie Diner head and the efforts in more recent years to preserve it as a piece of history is a long, weird story. (The Western Neighborhoods Project, a historical preservation organization devoted to the western areas of San Francisco, has a great batch of articles detailing the Doggie Diner head's saga.)
Hmm. I guess when giant heads roll around here, they are just destined to take some strange trips.
Anyway, I happen to be rather cheered to hear this big giant head apparently has finally found a resting place. Welcome back, DD!
