Book: Luigi Zoya "Father. Historical, psychological and cultural analysis. The role of a father is to guide the child into the world of Luigi Zoya

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© Institute of Practical Psychology and Psychoanalysis, 2004

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This text is not a monographic study in which the idea is presented, developed and completed with conclusions. It is rather like an odyssey - a theme very dear to the author - which takes us to places hitherto unknown to our minds, shows us corners of life that we usually avoid due to our inherent laziness mixed with timidity, leaves us on a deserted shore where monsters suddenly appear. , is a theme that challenges our intellectual or romantic audacity.

The path of this book runs both through the classical world of antiquity and through the current life of European society. Although the modern view of things, as usual, arrogates to itself the right to a "correct" interpretation of antiquity, there is an opposite point of view, which is that the "modern" human soul can be described from an ancient point of view. The impelling cause of human action is not the passion for knowledge and knowledge - Oedipus was endowed with it - but the need to live an intense mental life. Themes such as creation and growth, tragedy and analysis, soul and society are all rooted in and appear in the symbolic life of man. different ways and in many ways. Along with the change in theme, the style of writing also changes: sometimes, the work resembles the work of an artisan (the etymology is patiently explained, painstakingly recreated historical facts), in other cases, on the contrary, some word cuts into consciousness like a guillotine knife, cutting off the inertia of thought, breaking the usual course of thought (“tragedy laughs at our confusion”), and sometimes, the same word appears already in the epic narrative, envelops us with sensual images and leads us into the realm of paradox, although we are not aware of this. As in all true odysseys, the limit is not a place where one arrives at the end, but a continuous modification in the course of the journey. The text includes works (articles, reports at congresses) created by the author over ten years. From their collective reading arises a single mental effort: the desire to cultivate the soul.

Dedicated to Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig

Foreword

One day, psychoanalysts of various schools and directions decided to pretend that they did not know each other as specialists. In doing so, they did something even more complex and distressing. Since they always circled around the myth like dogs around a bone, they decided to use the myth to separate themselves.

Psychoanalysts knew that the exact name of their specialty was "depth psychology." And they were well acquainted with the myth of the Tower of Babel, which ends with everyone having to go their own way, because it is no longer possible to understand each other.

So psychoanalysts decided to re-incarnate this myth upside down: imagine a tower being built down into the ground.

Psychological reality does not develop upwards, but downwards. Moving deeper and deeper in search of psychological truth, they complicated the design of the inverted tower until, at some point, it became impossible to continue construction. Everyone began to speak their own language. Educate your own family. Deny that the language of others can serve as a means of expression truth(in a strange way, this lie, this slander looked true: and indeed, as far as other languages ​​are concerned, the truth is not called "truth", but by a different word). In general, psychoanalysts became aware of what was changing, but they went their separate ways and lost awareness of what remained stable and unchanged.

God - or a new god, or a new part of their brain that corresponded to the old concept of divinity - confused their languages, if not their very ideas. And psychoanalysts stopped communicating with each other.

I will clarify right away so as not to mislead the reader. This book was born out of the fact of the split. Even if this is a book on Jungian psychology, the break in question was not between Freud and Jung. It's about something else. This is a difference in psychological tendencies, which is often found in different authors (and even in the same authors, but in different periods of their work) when comparative analysis. Including in the works of Freud and Jung.

In essence, we are dealing with the opposition of the stable and the universal, on the one hand, and the variable and the particular, on the other.

The transition from one of these opposing principles to the other does not separate, but unites the leaders of the two schools. Freud's interest shifted over the years from purely clinical material to certain types pathology and individual patients, and then - to mythological, biblical themes, to the origin and meaning of culture. Jung, after short period clinical observations and experiments, refers to the study of archetypes: to religion, anthropology, alchemy, myths and fairy tales; to topics common to different peoples, regardless of era and place. Thus, both masters over time shift their attention from pathology (something other than the proper course of things) to models of the norm, which speak exactly how it should be.

In Zurich, they are still talking in an undertone - some with embarrassment, some with reproach - the next episode. An American came to Switzerland to get acquainted with the master, and after a while asked me to do some analysis with him. After a few sessions, Jung looked at him and said, “I'm sorry, but you tell me mostly about your parents and your dreams tell me the same thing. I understand that you need it, and I feel sympathy for you. But I cannot be your analyst: I am interested in archetypes” 1 .

In the twentieth century as a whole - and especially in the second half of it, after the death of both teachers - the orientation of the main psychoanalytic schools has shifted in the opposite direction. Both among the followers of Freud, and, to a lesser extent, among the followers of Jung, more and more attention began to be paid to age development: that is, a person who changes, as opposed to what remains unchanged in him. Moreover, they focused on the first stages of life; and since society at this stage has little to do with the child, his development as an individual, and not as a subject of culture and history, was of interest.

However, from what has been said, it is by no means possible to conclude that interest was categorically and exclusively focused on solving problems related to developmental psychology.

It can only be pointed out that today's psychotherapeutic attention to the development of the individual personality prevails in the public consciousness, since new circumstances of a legal, professional (not to say corporate) and market nature are pushing for movement in this direction. Indeed, all over the world, the psychotherapeutic market is close to saturation and, therefore, operates according to the laws of competition, as sharp today as it was previously unknown. This fact, combined with other historical circumstances—for example, the rapid birth of European legislation—brought the analytic schools to norms and involved them in processes of institutionalization that had never existed before. Returning to our topic, we note that this movement has shifted the focus of discussions and disputes from the universal to the particular, from the stable to the changeable: from the question about what psychoanalysis, or analytical psychology, can say about man and the world to the question about what this particular analyst can say about a particular patient (or even better: how much time and money it will take to recover). Because it is these questions that are of interest to ministerial officials and representatives of practical psychology.

If, nevertheless, the analyst has a strong enough voice to make himself heard as a professional who thinks about the whole person, and not just as a specialist in a particular therapeutic school, he can attract an unexpectedly large number of listeners. This is the case, for example, of James Hillman, 2 who reexamined the views of psychologists on the conditions of human existence.

At its core, what we are talking about is a special case of the involution of cultural and political debates in the world. After the decline of great ideologies, big topics are no longer discussed at all, there are no more significant differences between left and right; minds seem to be concerned only with the particular and the variable, that which has individual significance. However, it is enough to reproduce one of the universal and eternal themes in a new key (Shakespeare in the cinema, for example), and you find yourself in the face of unexpected success (but why unexpected?).

In general, this book was born like that. One day I received a request from one of my colleagues that seemed to me not quite definite. My colleague is a Greek Cypriot who lived in South Africa, then taught Jungian psychology in Eastern Europe, was the editor of a newspaper on Jungian analysis in the world and now lives in London. He asked me to set out my biography and my vital interests in a form suitable for publication. I thought that usually such things are practiced in case of death and therefore, out of superstition, they are left to others. But I also thought that it would probably be unfair to encourage others to recount my life without doing it myself. With some resistance, I began to consult my memory and my notes.

I found that after receiving my diploma in analytics, I devoted myself to clinical cases and particular problems for a long time: I even returned to Zurich for several years, where I received my diploma; and did it precisely because I was offered the opportunity to work in the clinic.

However, it turned out that over the past ten years - which, by chance or not, were recent years centuries - a growing number of my notes and reports, written on seemingly completely different occasions, expressed a general need to find things that have changed little over millennia: to understand whether some events that seem to us modern and new (let's take as an example the pernicious the charm of television talk shows or the craziness around Princess Diana), recurring signs of myth in its permanence.

I tried to rejoice that by embarking on this road (which leads to something greater and more stable), I was effortlessly approaching the great founders of psychoanalysis. In fact, I did not intend to go down this path and did not realize that I was going down it. Perhaps the progress along it happens simply over the years, when gradually we begin to be interested in immortality. And we are looking for greatness and constancy in our children or in the reflection of immortality.

Myth is one of the few proofs of immortality that appears before our eyes. We use it to remind us of the connection that exists between major mythological stories and psychological literature. Sophocles did not describe the Oedipus complex. Not only because the “complex” of Oedipus is only one of the possible explanations for his revenge, connected with a concept that did not yet exist in the time of Sophocles, but also because it is impossible to describe the universal through the particular. So if these pages say more about Freud and Jung, do not think that the intention to talk about timeless and universal issues turned our heads so much that we decided to adapt Homer to the needs of this book. On the contrary, the book itself—perhaps, like much of psychological literature- turns out to be a modest modern mouthpiece through which Homer and his myths still speak. There is a connection between the two worlds: but it is unlikely that depth psychology can somehow supplement Homer, who was deeper than any psychology.

1. Psyche and society

1.1. Analytical psychology and knowledge of the other person 3

The expression "bad teachers" is often used in Italian. Basically, they call those intellectuals who, after the proclamation of revolutionary slogans, turned out to be morally involved in the bloody terror unleashed by the "Red Brigades". Abstract conversations turned into concrete destinies. The Word became flesh. They could only defend themselves by blaming themselves: you shouldn't have taken me so literally, I didn't mean it at all.

I want to emphasize that in Italy the bad teachers were often the great masters of the greatest, or at least the most famous, art of our age: the cinema.

« Rome is an open city» Rossellini, a film-manifesto of neo-realism, describes the average Italian as infinitely compassionate and noble: with amazing uncriticality we accept this compliment and remember it. De Sica justifies "Bicycle Thieves": together with him we all justify ourselves, and theft becomes a national archetype. Fellini shows with forgiveness and sympathy our sexual promiscuity and our indifference: we find it delicate and sublime, we begin to proudly demonstrate our free-thinking and carelessness. We are sure that this evokes the sympathy of Europeans and North Americans for us, and we do not care that this sympathy is often accompanied by contempt. Maybe we don't know how to choose friends, but we know what kind of friendship we can benefit from.

The extreme point in this simplification - swallowed up by the masses, although the mass media were still in swaddling clothes, and extolled as if it were not about kitsch, but about the revival of cinema - is reached in a remarkable film " Italians are good(De Santis, 1964). The average Italian is good (moreover: he is a great guy, because good can be mistaken for a fool, and we have the right to be a little cunning, a little deceiver, while always remaining good). The Italian character is all in the light, there are no shaded areas in it. The Italian has no real enemies: when he dealt with allied troops and their enemies at the same time, he did it not out of duplicity and not for commercial gain, but out of an innate inability to feel hostile feelings.

So the Italians - and maybe some other happy nations– do not have a collective Shadow.

By Shadow, analytical psychology means that part of the unconscious psyche that is rejected by the ego because it consists of qualities that are morally unacceptable or simply too different from the ego. This second, broader assumption determines the hypothetical character of analytical psychology. The latter considers neurosis not as a disease, but as a "suggestion", a "message" about the possibility of growth, which is absent at the moment; and in the same way, she does not perceive the Shadow only as the lower part, immoral and unacceptable for the individual. Jung leaves this point of view to Freud. According to Jung, the whole psychology of his teacher is the most detailed study of the Shadow that has ever been undertaken. Freud was really concerned with a being hidden under the shell of a civilized man, which is still controlled by instincts and which contains a return to the archaic, and not an attempt to create something new; and such a "being", in such a context, inevitably opposes culture. A shadow, in a broader Jungian sense, is an unknown part that hides completeness and completeness in itself: what I need to know about myself in order to really know myself, what I need to know about the world in order to know the real world.

A very simple corollary follows from all this.

One who does not have a shadow is deprived of a fundamental instrument of knowledge, both individually and collectively. If I think that I do not have a shadow (lower, animal and predatory part - or simply different from how I usually see myself), a part different from me and my egoism (archetypes that invariably belong to the psychic) ​​do not cease to exist. Only internal qualities cease to exist, which are perceived from the outside, in others: in other words, they are projected.

The psychic and its archetypes do not function as a unit – in this case they would already be complete and would not “function”, remaining static – but in pairs of complementary components. Puer exists only in opposition to Senex, child with old man. A child does not exist by itself: there is a single archetype with two poles - a child and an old man. Masculine and feminine are not defined by themselves, but as distinct from the other sex, and so on. One of the two poles corresponds to the ego, the other is internal and unconscious. If I am a man, then there is a woman hidden in my unconscious, I project this inner figure outward and die from the desire to connect with her. If I am an old man, I suffer from nostalgia for my youth.

You don't have to ask Jung every time to discover this. Already Plato in the "Symposium" symbolically told us about these limitations: in the beginning, people combined both sexes in themselves. Zeus broke them into two separate beings - a man and a woman, which, in fact, are only two halves of one whole. From that moment, suffering from irresistible longing, they are always looking for each other. In search of the other, we are trying to restore our own original integrity.

The so-called transference and countertransference in analytic work are also nothing more than metaphors, expressing a powerful need to heal the split of the archetypal couple of the sick - the healer and restore integrity. The therapist, who, by virtue of his profession, stands at one pole, tries to get closer to the patient, because he wants to become whole and find his Shadow, the sick one inside him. The patient, who has been forced by illness to the other pole, wants to connect with the analyst in order to symbolically find his inner healer, the only one who can restore his stable balance. As long as the other remains unconscious within himself, he is projected and recognized only in others. But this projection is already the beginning of knowledge and the path to gaining integrity.

These facts were well explained by Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig 5 who also supplemented them with a paradoxical assertion. Analysts who succumb to the temptation to manipulate the patient in order to gain power over him or seduce him inevitably "get stuck": they neglected the importance of symbols even before professional ethics, the goal of analysis is to acquire two split poles of the healer-sick archetype, and not two personifying their people.

However, other analysts who never get involved in such manipulations (in which the patient tries to involve them) and keep their distance, those whose work lacks erotic tension, are flawed in their own way. Not only are they static, and because of this, they hardly change anything in the patient: they spread the cult of self-sufficiency and indifference to differences, incompatible with our ideal of the mental as an organ that is in constant motion, always interested, a component that constantly strives for integrity. . They are "great therapists" - a discouraging professional variety of "great guys."

If we stop the former who want to dominate the patient, then such analysts will - we hope - admit their mistake, which contains a creative indication of the need to recognize the other and assimilate it. And then, having paid for the mistake, they get the opportunity to purchase a ticket for a more fulfilling life.

The second, self-sufficient analysts, have nothing to criticize for, because those who do not move do not make mistakes in choosing the path: but they will not make the trip itself. In the long run, they may turn out to be more dangerous than the first, since the need for a confrontation with the "other half" may arise unexpectedly and take them by surprise.

The collective psyche can be thought of in similar terms.

The ideal would be to live in a society that is tolerant of differences, conscious and responsible for its existence both within itself and in relation to neighboring peoples. Since such conditions are little more than a wish, in reality we find many countries in which there are national, sexual and other minorities, marginal groups, foreigners whom the majority tries to manipulate and which they seek to suppress; there are some countries that are homogenous and influential enough to allow themselves a life that, psychologically speaking, bears the traits of autism in ignorance and willful ignorance of the existence of the other.

Among them, Italy is in the front row. The Jewish diaspora in it is small and absorbed by Christianity, there are traditionally few immigrants from other continents due to the lack of colonies; Italy is unfamiliar with others on its territory. Unlike other languages European countries- English, French, German, Spanish and even Portuguese - Italian is spoken only in Italy. However, the territory of the country and the Italian-speaking population are large enough so that there is no particular need to learn other languages ​​and know other peoples. Unlike, for example, the Dutch or Scandinavians, in whose countries navigation is developed and who, because of this, are well acquainted with many other peoples; due to the small distribution of their languages, they learn from childhood to use other languages.

Outwardly, over the past few centuries, the country called Italy has not come face to face with communities of others, either outside or inside. The absence of this practice has given rise to the maxim that Italians are not racists, an exception in Europe, which invented racism; a vicious circle is formed in the country with the statement about "well done". Through a falsification that suits everyone, what was only a lack turned out to be a virtue.

Presenting his book in Moscow, Luigi Zoya admitted that the reason for writing it was the observation that among publications on psychology, there are eight books about mothers for one book about a father. The exaltation of the role of women (both in child development and in society) has become a distinct trend in science and culture in general. Modern men are disoriented about their gender identity: raised by women, they are forced to play by the rules invented for them by their mothers.

A personal discovery that prompted Zoya to write a book was an understanding of the role of a father's gesture - to raise a child on outstretched arms above him. He found the first mention of this gesture in Homer's Iliad (Hector's gesture). In ancient Greece, the father, not the mother, gave life to the child, biological childbirth did not play a special role. Much more important were social births, that is, a symbolic gesture - the proclamation of a child as his heir. Raising a child to the sky where the gods dwell means creating a connection with the spiritual dimension. The mother gives birth to an animal, and the father gives birth to a man. Maternal is natural and primary, given to us by default (mother and matter are the same root words in many languages). And the concept of "father", as Zoya shows with examples from evolutionary biology, arises only in the process of cultural development. The father deals with ideals, values, norms, social connections, designing the future. The mother produces the child, and the father guides him into the world.

Today, everything is different: a man helps to produce a child, and then is reduced to the role of a breadwinner. But from the point of view of psychoanalysis, the earner, the breadwinner is not a man at all: feeding is the function of the mother. It is not even the mother that is projected onto the man, but the so-called partial object - the mother's breast. There can be no relationship with the breast, it can only be consumed. Not surprisingly, men resist becoming surrogate mothers to their wives: they procrastinate or refuse to enter into marriages that threaten to castrate masculinity instead of realizing it.

That's why detailed analysis ancient patterns of paternity is important to us. We want to know how, at what turn of history we lost our father. Its role must be restored, otherwise modern Western man is threatened with literally extinction. Zoya's book gives men a sense of the importance of their mission, helps women understand and accept the positive side of patriarchy, and helps readers of both sexes to build relationships with their (bad and absent) fathers, whom they tend to blame for all troubles.

About the author of the book

Luigi Zoja- Italian psychoanalyst and writer, one of the leaders of Jungian psychology. The book "Father" was awarded the prestigious international award "Gradiva", translated into many languages ​​and became a world bestseller among humanitarian publications. Luigi Zoya "Father. Historical, psychological and cultural analysis” URSS, 280 p.

* Luigi Zoya took part in the international conference "Fathers and Sons" organized by the Moscow Association of Analytical Psychology (MAAP) in October this year.

The full title of the book is Father. Historical, psychological and cultural analysis”, i.e. - this is not a manual on how to be a father. This is an attempt by the author to figure out - who is this - the father, what does he do, what does he think about, what does he feel? On the one hand, these questions sound like an attempt by a Jungian thinker and analyst to analyze, but at the same time they are similar to the questions of a child who does not see his father for days and weeks and is trying to understand who he is, what he does, and they are similar to the questions of a person who , not finding answers in childhood, grew up and went "in search" of his father - with the same questions - who is he, what does he live ... In general, the author is on the same side with people who would like to know this, and together with them goes in search. He himself says that he has no answers, but only "sketches" made according to descriptions in old stories about his father (in the myths of Odysseus, Hector, Aeneas, in John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, etc.), and honestly admits the suspicion that the father as such no longer exists, and to find him now will mean recreating him according to the "outline", on his own, in himself.

I can’t stand the story in this style anymore, I’ll be simpler. I read the book a long time ago, and the thoughts that I wrote out from there, and now I will retell it in my own words (it will be shorter; the book itself is quite lengthy, for which some in the reviews criticize it, they say, “a lot of water”), were a discovery for me, I liked them , I agree with them. I can hardly explain or argue for the author why he decided one way or another. But to talk about my attitude to his ideas, about why I share them - I can do it. And I will be glad if someone finds something interesting for themselves here.

I post everything in fragments (I don’t see the need to link them together).

It all starts with an episode from Freud's biography. When he was little, his father told him how he ran into a passerby on the street. At that time, the sidewalks were so narrow that it was impossible for two people to pass each other on them, someone had to step aside, and when Freud's father, Jakob, saw a man coming towards him, he, being a not very decisive person, stopped, hesitated. The man saw this confusion, tore off the hat from Jacob's head, and, shouting - "Get out of the way, Jew!" He threw his hat into the dirt.

I stepped off the sidewalk and picked up my hat, - answered the father.

Ernest Jones (Freud's biographer) believes that because of this story the boy experienced a deep shock: in the man whom he always considered a role model, there was nothing heroic, no courage. Jones believes that this episode later influenced the theory of psychoanalysis, where the son is considered the inevitable rival of the father, and became one of the motives for criticism of religion, where there is also God the Father.

It is so arranged that a child, having seen the humiliation of his mother, does not cease to love her, but if the same thing happens to the father, and he does not answer, does not turn out to be a fearless hero, it will be difficult for the child to endure. This is the special position of the father: on the one hand, he must be a man, a winner, a male who boldly enters into any fight, and on the other hand, he must remember that, entering into battle, he may die or be crippled, and leave his family in distress, or, in case of victory, he will doom another family to difficulties. In general, since humanity has a family, a man has been constantly faced with a choice - to be a “father” (thinking about the future) or a “male” (fearless, satisfying momentary desires, who does not care about the future).

Fatherhood as the ability to "think about children, about the family" and for this to patiently endure internal conflicts(for example, the same humiliation) is not instinctive behavior, it is the result of mental activity. Nor is it an instinctive behavior to feed and protect one's children and women, this intention was "a decision made at the beginning of civilization" and then became a tradition. And the very awareness of being a father is also the result of intellectual constructions: for a woman, the appearance of a child occurs in the most obvious way, and a man can realize his involvement in the emergence of a new life only with the help of thinking. In a word, everything that concerns fatherhood (as a culture) is ultimately “the result of thought and will”, i.e., it is a completely artificial construction. And this artificiality turned out to be both strength and weakness of the father. Strength in the sense that the principles of fatherhood (which are discussed below) made it possible to develop civilization, and weakness in that the fulfillment of this role, and the very desire to be a father, can be relatively easily destroyed (“killed”) by that inner “male”.

WHO IS A FATHER

One who teaches his family what is right and provides opportunities for the realization of this knowledge;

Who patiently endures internal conflicts, thinking not only about himself;

Who does not attack, but defends his home, family (hence the designation of defensive wars as "domestic");

Who thinks in projects, thinks about the future;

Who does not say “everyone does this” (and you do it), but his voice inside tells you what you should do.

Why suddenly an inner voice ... the fact is that the father is not a specific man, or rather, not only, and not only a role, it is also a principle. Often people grow up "without a father", even if he actually was, and in the future, at the place in the psyche where he should have been, they feel ambiguity or even emptiness, which is why there is such a phenomenon as the "search for the father" that they are engaged in people have matured, and they are already looking not for a person, realizing that this will not give them anything, but the principle itself, answers to how one should act, therefore there is no difference in whether to call a person a father or a set of ideas that internally strengthen and give forces.

FATHER GESTURE

IN ancient greece and Rome, this gesture was a simple action - the man took the child in his arms and raised it above him. He showed it to the sky (gods) and society, they say, now it is not matter (before the gesture, it was believed that the child was an inanimate being, matter, the offspring of the mother: the words “mother” and “matter” in many languages ​​have the same root), that the mother gave him life physical, and he gives spiritual life, that from horizontal relationships, while he was running there on all fours under the table and crouching on his mother’s chest, the father now transfers him into vertical relationships - with society and the gods, and society now knows that the child becomes part of it , and the gods ... this gesture symbolized an appeal to them with a request that the son - as he is now higher - so that in the future he will surpass his father in everything - be smarter than him, stronger, more successful, etc. These were thoughts for the future of the child, and for the future in general.

Some psychologists believe that tossing children over oneself in the form of a game of entertainment is an echo of that archaic gesture. And, perhaps, most importantly, with this gesture, the man informed everyone that he would now be a father, he decided so, so he wanted, and now he undertakes not only to feed and clothe, but also to teach everything. Now the equivalent of the gesture is paternal praise, support, approval, this is also a kind of “rise”.

PATRIARCHY

When and how it arose, I did not understand, but the book describes the events that dealt blows to the patriarchy, gradually destroying it.

The Greek comedies dealt the first blow, ridiculing the “wretched” relationship between a frivolous spender son and a grumbling, incredulous father.

The second blow is Christianity with the thesis that the Father and the Son are one, that is, the father is not more important, not more important than the son.

The third blow was dealt by the Christian church, obliging a man to be the father of all children born in a legal marriage. That is, paternity ceased to be the decision of a man, perhaps even then formal (if already forced) paternity began, through the sleeves, because of which two forms of parenthood were introduced in Roman law: nutritor (breadwinner) - he was obliged to provide shelter and food, and nothing more, for all legitimate children, the father was obliged to be a nutritionist, and pater is a father in the full sense, it was impossible to force this, it remained a right (and, if you look, even today, full-fledged fatherhood remains a right).

The fourth blow was dealt by the bourgeois revolution with the idea of ​​general education, when fathers were, as it were, excommunicated from the education of their children, they began to be taught in schools.

The fifth blow is the industrial revolution. At first, however, women and children went to the factories, but the owners quickly realized that male labor is more efficient, so the children and wives were returned back, and the men were taken away, in general, it’s not so important who went where and where he returned, it turned out like this, that "the revolution took away their families from the fathers." And also took away from them those small workshops, farms where they worked.

Since then, the fathers have not seen their children (not all and not always, but often there were hostels near the factories, and on weekdays men did not go home, they spent the night there), and the children did not see their fathers, they no longer saw how they work in the workshops, where they used to spend time together, and in general the children no longer saw - what an adult man actually does, what he thinks, what he feels, the children no longer had “colors for the mental image of an adult man, his skills, the tasks he faced, his strength, talents, qualities,<…>; and the emptiness that arose in the child's psyche gradually began to be filled with disturbing fantasies.

The sixth blow - there were two world wars, before that - again - maybe such protracted wars did occur, but not on such a scale when millions of children did not see their fathers for years.

FEMINISM AND PATRIARCHY

By the time feminism emerged, patriarchy was only a smoldering wreckage. The struggle of women against injustice on the part of men, with their unwillingness to think about the future, with attempts to satisfy their momentary needs by force - this was already a struggle with "males", a struggle with the principle of "brother" (not father), which by that time had spread and got stronger Therefore, to say that feminism has destroyed (or is destroying) patriarchy, or that it is fighting or harming it, is simply stupid.

"BROTHER PRINCIPLE"

The author believes that competition is a sign of the disappearance of the “paternal”, albeit not complete, but sort of dissolution, that this is the occupation of the “brothers”, because if one father kills the other, then not one person will suffer, but all those who are from him depends, and the fathers understand this among themselves and do not do so; The "brothers" in this sense have no one to worry about, they always killed each other. Likewise, this dream of consumption - to crouch on the breast of civilization and suck everything out of it, all the blessings - this is not a "father's" dream, it seems to "children" a bright dream, a worthy goal, an occupation that does them honor.

PATHERHOOD IN EUROPE

The co-parenthood that is now in Europe - the author does not consider fatherhood, there is no father, there the man, as it were, duplicates the role of mother, he is mother's friend, he does not bring the child into society, in Big world, and he, as it were, goes away from the world and society into a small world, closes there with the child, and it turns out that he does not raise him into the “vertical”, but he himself goes into horizontal relations, first - figuratively speaking - being washed, disinfected and admitted to child - wraps himself in diapers with him, then tries to become his “friend”, playing computer games with him, finding out what memes, music, etc. are relevant now. In general, this is all progressive, but in meaning, in purpose, such behavior does not fit into the principle of the father. Perhaps that is why it is not called fatherhood, but co-parenting, at least it is honest.

___________________

That's all.

Perhaps, in the passages, Zoya's main idea is not so clearly visible, that paternity (both a phenomenon and a principle) - once having arisen, like a flash, all subsequent history faded away. And now one can see only “hearths” and “hearths” scattered around the planet, individual attempts to revive it. For example, the black population of the United States, about a third of whom decided to place patriarchal ideas and values ​​as the basis of their culture, moved into the so-called. middle class. The rest, who have chosen the path of "males", live in slums or cities like Detroit. In general, everything is not so simple with this patriarchy.