The Magus - John Fowles [224]
any belief in him. He has careerwise continually placed himself in situations of isolation. His solution of his fundamental separation anxiety requires him to cast himself as the rebel and outsider. His unconscious intention in seeking this isolation is to find a justification for his preying on women and also for his withdrawal from any community orientated in directions hostile to his fundamental needs of self-gratification. The subject's family, caste and national background has not helped in the resolution of his problems. He comes of a military family, in which there were a large number of taboos resulting from a strongly authoritarian paternal regime. His caste in his own country, that of the professional middle class, Zwiemarm's _technobourgeoisie_, is of course marked by an obsessional adherence to such regimes. In a remark to Dr. Maxwell the subject reported that "All through my adolescence I had to lead two lives." This is a good layman's description of environment-motivated and finally consciously induced paraschizophrenia--"madness as lubricant," in Karen Homey's famous phrase. On leaving university the subject put himself in the one environment he would not be able to tolerate--that of an expensive private school, the social transmitter of all those paternalistic and authoritarian traits the subject hates. Predictably he then felt himself forced both out of the school and out of his country, and adopted the role of expatriate, though he insured himself against any valid adjustment by once again choosing an environment--the school on Phraxos--which was certain to provide him with the required elements of hostility. His work there is academically barely adequate and his relationship with his colleagues and students poor. To sum up, he is behaviorally the victim of a repetition compulsion that he has failed to understand. In every environment he looks for those elements that allow him to feel isolated, that allow him to justify his withdrawal from meaningful social responsibilities and relationships and his consequent regression into the infantile state of frustrated self-gratification. At present this autistic regression takes the form mentioned above, of affaires with young women. Although previous attempts at an artistic resolution have apparently failed, we may predict that further such attempts will be made and that there will be the normal cultural life-pattern of the type: excessive respect for iconoclastic _avant-garde_ art, contempt for tradition, paranosic sympathy with fellow rebels and nonconformers in conflict with frequent depressive and persecutory phases in personal and work relationships. As Dr. Conchis has observed in his _The Midcentury Predicament_: "The rebel with no specific gift for rebellion is destined to become the drone; and even this metaphor is inexact, since the drone has at least a small chance of fecundating the queen, whereas the human rebel-drone is deprived even of that small chance and may finally see himself as totally sterile, lacking not only the brilliant life success of the queens but even the humble satisfactions of the workers in the human hive. Such a personality is reduced to mere wax, a mere receiver of impressions; and this condition is the very negation of the basic drive in him--to rebel. It is no wonder that in middle age many such failed rebels, rebels turned self-conscious drones, aware of their susceptibility to intellectual vogues, adopt a mask of cynicism that cannot hide their more or less paranoiac sense of having been betrayed by life." While she had been speaking the others at the table listened in their various ways, some looking at her, others sunk in contemplation of the table. Lily was one of the most attentive. The "students" scribbled notes. I spent all my time staring at the woman, who never once looked at me. I felt full of spleen, of hatred of all of them. There was some truth in what she was saying. But I knew nothing could justify such a public analysis, even if it were true; just as nothing could justify Lily's behaviour--because most of the