Of course attempting to clarify the specific unconscious agendas of such artists may not be appreciated, or may promote moral judgments of a more subtle kind than Victorian censors would have made. If the defensive limitations of these liberationists are exposed, not everybody will cheer because the implications for us all are also made clearer. We live in an atmosphere of lenience towards abusive imagery in art and advertising, even as laws prohibit or punish its enactments. So doesn’t society need to know what its central cultural forces are attempting to say on its behalf? When there are new psychological tools to refine psychobiography shouldn’t they be welcomed? Art critics and promoters in the art market will still bridle, psychological interpretation seeming to be against their interests. Yet there is some level of organized or disorganized psychology behind every statement that gains cultural currency. Every artist whose work merits criticism or sells in the market throws probes into some part of our collective anxieties that need explicating. Each has given form to some aspect of anxious dissonance needing resolution through symbolic interactive repair (or at least palliation) of the psyche. I have tried to show that attachment theory and research provide powerful new means of understanding interpersonal developmental determiners of anxious male attitudes to women. Attachment theory gives a new account of human nature at the psycho-biological level. It stands apart from the ideologies which can divide men and women into hostile camps and also mistakenly turn art into something sacrosanct, untouchable and unreal. As looking seriously at art is a leading means of regulating individual mood, and collective cultural anxieties, it is well that both men and women have an enhanced understanding of where its disturbing imagery actually arises. I believe that this new way of seeing created products of the anxiously avoidant male psyche will enrich rather than diminish the value of art. It will complete the circle of communication that now remains half closed.
This conclusion briefly enlarges upon some important questions raised in the psychobiographical discussions of artists and their work. Mention of a few key studies will point the direction to resolving questions beyond the scope of the chapters themselves. It is hoped that further investigations applying attachment theory will follow. Feminists have been reluctant to search very far into the true causes of misogyny, preferring an ideology of “patriarchy” which assumes that by nature men are dominant and oppressive. Freud’s early theorizing about the Oedipus complex in Totem and Taboo (1912) alerted feminist writers to psychological causes of male sexual conflict, but few felt constrained to follow criticisms and correctives of this theory among post-Freudians.1 Despite male concern with dominating or “phallic women” from such books as Philip Wylie’s A Generation of Vipers (1942) onward, feminists are reluctant to call mothering in question. Yet if understanding is to advance, styles of mothering must be systematically studied as attachment researchers informed by the basic insights of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth are doing. Moralizing about predatory and subjugating male behaviour, assuming that “boys/men will be boys/men” lacking the moral sensibility of women, is no longer helpful. Misogynistic anxiety amongst men is surely not inevitable, a genetic inheritance, and its causes must be sought in developmental variables, beyond the assumed effects of raging male hormones. The causes to study are interpersonal, social and cultural, concerning how men and women relate to each other without casting blame on one sex/gender or the other. The earliest pre-Oedipal mother-infant interactions have been the most neglected but are the most critical to understand because they are the basis of psychological readiness to acquire whatever society and culture have to offer as guidance to further development. The factors that produced the arresting group fantasies of artists such as Picasso, Bellmer, Balthus and Cornell are firstly relational, or interactional, in a multi-factorial setting and not just what might be expected of weak or wicked males who happened to be endowed with great talent.
Influential feminists such as Joan Smith wrote that misogyny “is one of the concealed well-springs of our culture. It is a secret kept by men and women, because neither group wants to acknowledge that it is really going on: men because they do not want to admit their fear of women’s power, women because the truth is too uncomfortable to live with, and because they have been deceived”.2 Appealing to moral sensibility, Smith called for a change of attitude, as did Marilyn French who also condemned male dominance of women using the rubric of “patriarchy”. Other writers also sounded the alarm about the “epidemic” violence of men against women, such that we all might fear for the species. A collusive system of male oppression of women is described as a sort of “secret police force”, maintained by some men and giving all men unfair advantages.3 However, Smith and French et al. lack any relational or psychodynamic explanation for the oppression they rightly deplore. There is, however, a hint of one in Rosalind Miles’s The Rites of Man ,who, while given to oversimplifications about “masculinity”, observes that “Aggression is an attitude, not a biological imperative, and as such it is heavily taught, initiated and encouraged in boys from birth ...”.4 Miles thinks that sexual violence is the consequence of social conditioning gone wrong, recognizing that a mother’s power over her male infant and child has something to do with distortions of adult male behaviour. Of the deviant boy she writes, “for the rest of his life he will resent her power, either the power of her warmth (too engulfing, too reminiscent of his powerlessness), or the arctic winter of her coldness (too abandoning, too life-threatening). He will have been driven out of the house of women, and so denied access to the regular expression of unforced feeling. He will have learned instead the hardening of pain, humiliation and aggression, and the art of fighting as self-expression ....” Miles thus finds the “fear of fear ... at the core of male identity”.5 She was perhaps thinking of the shocking sort of gratuitous male violence portrayed in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). Miles thus comes close in general terms to the much more fully elaborated insights of attachment research highlighting the defects of mother-infant interdependence, especially as affecting males. However, the politics of feminism tends not to allow for a flawed attachment explanation of misogyny while seldom offering reasoned explanations of its dismissal. Feminists tend to see mothers as victims of psychological theorizing and the restraints on freedom to which they may lead.
Why have feminists been reluctant to decry and condemn violence against females in the work of artists such as those discussed in this study? Marilyn French, for example, sees that while there is a “war against women in art”, little serious study of it has been attempted. Her comment is: “Feminists do point out the woman-hatred in the work of painters like Willem de Kooning, Picasso, or Balthus’s portrayals of shockingly lascivious little girls, but a feminist analysis of art is impeded by the fact that we are pledged in our souls to freedom of expression. Artists appropriate the female body as their subject, their possession. Whether they paint women with hatred or idealize them or vapidly sentimentalize them (like Renoir, say) or appropriate them with cold superiority (like Degas, say) they are implicitly assaulting female reality and autonomy. But we cannot deny artists their right to their own vision.”6 While perhaps the artists’s “vision” in a fully realized composition cannot be questioned, its psychogenic origin could be—exposing where the misogynic imagery “came from”. Certainly French is right to forestall attempts to limit artists’ freedom of expression. Limiting artistic expression through proscribing imagery that demeans females would lose the communication such artists are making. Of course, there are extremes of displaying sadistic entrapment, torture, killing and dismemberment that no civilized society should tolerate. But to proscribe the sorts of expressive distortions of females mainly studied here would be a loss to everybody. The emergence of Picasso’s sort of manipulation of the female portrait is surely symptomatic of a long suppressed pathology about which society needs to know. That he had the temerity to originate the destructive imagery of Dora Maar, for instance, is a symptom of much greater magnitude than its origin in Picasso’s own psychopathology can account for. The art market, supported by critics, has magnified to enormous proportions the slur on females of the Dora Maar portraits and others. They readily joined the popular mythology of their time, and we need to know how and why Picasso so successfully tapped into the collective male anxiety about females as arousing yet captivating sexual aggressors.