The Way Men Think

This study of creativeness, sex and gender demonstrates the relationship of the intellectual to the personal and sexual, not only in the creative arts but in science and technology too. The authors examine the workings of the male mind and the ways in which the sexes are united and yet divided.

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This study of creativeness, sex and gender demonstrates the relationship of the intellectual to the personal and sexual, not only in the creative arts but in science and technology too. Typically male habits of thought are traced to a developmental crisis experienced by small boys - the male 'wound'. This wound leads to a splitting of imaginative preoccupation, inclining men to see people as though they were things, and things as though they were people. The authors show this pattern to have highly significant costs and benefits. It enables men to invest the world of machines and of abstract ideas with intense emotional significance, but it also renders them vulnerable both to personal insensitivity and misogyny, and to the grosser forms of sexual perversion. In the creative arts, this split can be healed. Even here, though, the costs are high, for the artist and for those who inspire him, as examples from the worlds of photography, poetry and painting reveal. The core of the book's argument lies in the interweaving of the public and the private, neatly echoing the partnership of the authors themselves.
Married twenty-five years ago, they have worked together both in research and in the visual arts ever since. They furnish their story with illustrations, ranging from the famous psychologist B.F.Skinner who brought up his baby daughter in a box, to the writer Thomas Hardy, who although not on speaking terms with his wife Emma, addressed to her, after her death, some of the most eloquent love poetry in the language.