a Jansenist Franny ?
Scottie Bowman (bowman@mail.indigo.ie)
Wed, 18 Feb 1998 08:20:12 +0000
Diego wonders, very reasonably, if I regard anorexia
as a trivial complaint. No. Certainly not. I've watched
too many young women shrivel from it to think of it with
anything other than a sinking heart.
Nor, actually, did I seriously suggest Franny was anorexic.
(Not pregnant either, by the way.) I was, somewhat flippantly,
putting her in the context of so many adolescents who, confronted
with the imperiousness of their developing bodies, have often
rejected that whole physical realm in disgust & sought some kind
of alternative in the `spiritual'.
After a brief honeymoon with his ideas in my very early days,
I'd never mention Jung in the same breath as his teacher.
But he did make one very valid observation: that the first half
of life is for living & that religious concerns are only really
relevant after the age of about forty. Many years after he & Freud
had split over the sexual origin of mental drives, he was still
magnanimous enough to suggest that young people who became
obsessed with the religious & spiritual (which were *his* concerns)
would do better learning to live with their own sexual, competitive
& survival instincts. Time enough for pondering & evaluating the
ends of existence, he suggested, when one had acquired some
material to work with.
This chimes with my own sympathy with Holden, a young man
struggling to discover & assert his own individuality in the face
of a hostile world - & my slight impatience with the pampered,
sometimes rather gaseous, exchanges of the Glass family.
Scottie B.