Brink’s Pioneering Study of Sexual Obsession in Modern Fiction

Book Review of Andrew Brink, Obsession and Culture: A Study of Sexual Obsession in Modern Fiction. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Hardcover, $39.50.

In Obsession and Culture Andrew Brink conducts an original and well-informed investigation into the ways that male sexual conflicts over women in fiction can be read as indexes of entrenched social disorders. He examines the work of such authors as H.G. Wells, Hermann Hesse, Vladimir Nabokov, John Fowles, and John Updike. In our present context of serial monogamy, domestic violence, deadbeat dads, and rearguard or vanguard attempts to reconstitute masculinity, Brink’s contributions are especially timely, provocative, and incisive. Advancing these discourses on far deeper and more elusive levels than other studies, he is able to cast new light on the roots of these problems.

In tackling this task, he formulates and connects three models, each of which offers an original means of organizing the material, although unavoidably raising certain difficulties. The Psychohistorical Model perceives writers as delegates for “wishes latent in society” who strive to “solve emotional problems central to the group.” These problems intersect with the writers’ conflicts and needs for self-expression while legitimizing otherwise taboo subjects in fictions that help members of the group “work out their own anxieties” (pp. 14-15, 50-51). Brink fits this process to deMause’s evolutionary model of the psychoclass in which writers mediate for the group between generational parenting and resultant sexual practices.

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The Psychodynamic Model draws on Freud’s pathbreaking studies of childhood obsessional struggles over love/hate for the same object, the anxiety aroused over hostile or guilty thoughts, and the defensive countermeasures of isolation, undoing, and reaction formation (pp. 16-19). Splitting displaces this emotional ambivalence onto women who are then typecast as whores/madonnas and treated accordingly. As Freud reported in another pioneering study, “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life,” males who try to reconcile this dichotomy through marriage typically suffer phychic impotence — the emotional currents of tenderness and sensuality being separated due to incest fears. Thus, where they feel passion they disallow feelings of affection, and where they feel affection they negate passion. The same male dilemma was recently delivered in the film When Harry Met Sally as though it were news. Since these are traditional conflicts that the selected male novelists represent and attempt to resolve, one has to allow for generous elasticity in the obsessional model. It may be accepted that the writers’ overtly “taboo subjects” of “promiscuity [Don Juanism], pedophilia, and bisexuality” (p. 15) are displacements of incestuous wishes, with the oedipal triangulation of conflicts then being regressively relocated in the dyad of love/hate instituted during the anal period.

The Attachment Model pushes these conflicts to earlier stages of infant/mother interaction. Of the various resultant styles — secure, anxious/avoidant, anxious/resistant, disorganized/disoriented — however, Brink is constrained to admit that the open/obsessional novelist under scrutiny is at best a hybrid (p. 25). Attachment theory does offer empirical data for variants in early parenting modes, but there are also liabilities in its tendency to slip from psychodynamic process to a behavioral model of input/output parity and to override other developmental phases that structure the psyche throughout childhood and beyond. While a balance between urges and objects (loved ones) is needed, the emphasis is on mothering, often accompanied by scenarios of seduction and trauma. This diminishes Freud’s original contributions to early drive theory and paradoxically produces a more culturally-attractive mode of victims/oppressors. (Russell Jacoby’s Social Amnesia [1975] is a good antidote to post-Freudian meliorists). Nonetheless, I was pleased to find Brink dusting off and putting to good use a related concept of “Jocasta mothering,” in which the son becomes the delegate for fulfilling the mother’s repressed sexual and hostile wishes (pp. 36-40).

Thus, Brink’s three models exist in an uneasy but generally fertile tension. Brink’s own position emerges from his situating obsessional conflicts in the preoedipal period of mothering as variously disruptive, or in psychohistorical modes, intrusive. “The writers studied here speak for what might be called the sexually ambivalent unconscious of an overmothered psychoclass.” Attachment theory clarifies this “emotional overloading” that leads to anxiety, gender confusion, object splitting, and the male’s defensively controlling women (pp. 198, 204). The solution lies not in the “countercontrol of controlling mothers,” but in more enlightened parenting (p. 50). In this respect, writers function as early warning systems that sound the “actual erotic and punitive wishes that inhibit harmonious relations between the sexes” (p. 198).

Though I might opt for more emphasis on the drive and less on the object, giving more attention to oedipal issues, and proposing poor-mothering rather than overmothering as a problem in the preoedipal periods, I find Brink’s account of sexual obsession revealed through modern fiction intriguing, stimulating, and thoroughly engaging. For the first time, he effectively demonstrates how literature, child development theories, and psychohistory can be fruitfully combined. Thus his study deserves to be called pioneering.

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