Downtown New York

Without the Twin Towers, Downtown New York is barely recognizable. Its dumpy oblong skyscrapers could be anywhere – Phoenix, Atlanta, Vancouver, Miami, Seattle, even Bogotá. Along with the Empire State Building, they were the defining insignia, the animistic totem of the tribe of New Yorkers. Now, Downtown could be anywhere, anyone’s.

Which is which?

Which is which? Answers at the bottom of this post.

The city’s identity is saved by the Empire State Building in Midtown, and the monumentally over-sized bridges of the East River. These symbols retain the distinctive arrogance of the new imperialism, as the palaces of London, Paris and Vienna manifest the contempt of the wealthy imperialist for his pillaged colonies.

Architecturally, in New York’s loss, we can see the indispensability of enduring landmark buildings in the definition of location. It is these iconic buildings which should reflect the people for whom they become a landscape, a permanent backdrop, and in reflecting them, also represent them symbolically, become their identity. Egypt and the Pyramids, Paris and La Tour Eiffel and Notre Dame, London has many defining landmarks – Tower Bridge, The Palace of Westminster perhaps above all. Thus architects have a responsibility to those in whose backyards they build – a responsibility of psychological affiliation. They must not construct their own personal visions, but use their vision to sum up the enduring and possibly concealed identity of the citizens and inhabitants of those places. These icons must be built to last, as a civilization’s identity lasts longer than the lifetime of one of its inhabitants. My identity as a Londoner comes in great part from absorbing a sense of myself through my surroundings: the River Thames, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Palace of Westminster, the BT Tower, Canary Wharf, views from Hampstead Heath and Kenwood House, Tower Bridge, the Eye, Westway, St Pancras; equally the future “identity”, inasmuch as such a thing exists, of future Londoners will continue to be fashioned by these same influences.

This necessity, for endurance and quality, must be in the forefront of an architect’s mind: will it last? is it a gift to the future of its setting? will it become part of the identity of its place? can it become its location? The swagger of riches, the two-fingered salute to socialism that the Twin Towers were, could only exist in New York, and so naturally came to be an allegory for the city.

Equally Tower Bridge, the Victorian re-invention of an idealised faux-Gothic memory, could only represent London: the centre of a country, perhaps more than any other, which is both proud of its past and hostage to it.

The Twin Towers were a timely emblem for New York and for New Yorkers. They perfectly pre-empted and went on to represent the phenomenal financial success of the 80s, they were a temple to the values of the modern capitalist paradigm. Like a symbol such as St Peter’s in Rome, they could be seen all over the city – a moral certainty, a harbinger of the new meritocracy, a reflection of what the city stood for, evidence that bigger was better. They were also what New York was to the world – confident, wealthy, brash, fearful, oversized, defiant, exhilarating.

Psychologically, psychoanalytically, Downtown Manhattan was castrated on 11/09. In "The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy" (1910, p144), Freud states that the child is “in fear of the father, in defiance of the father and in disbelief of the father.” This child wants both to ape his father, but also kill or castrate him. The instinctive urges of the child - of an adolescent civilization - attacked from envy what it both hates and yet aspires to be: a strong and self-determining civilization. This “father” (in this case perhaps an uncle – Uncle Sam) is powerful and vengeful, it can both bestow and withhold, save and destroy, punish and reward. Since 2001, America has reinforced the relationship of an inconsistent father alternately criticising and spoiling an angry juvenile son. Through retributions, wars, invasions and threats it punishes; simultaneously it rewards: cajoling, sweetening, rebuilding and making promises, expecting to raise the rest of the world in its own dysfunctional image, like a parent filling its child with all the faults it had.

Photos are, from top: Seattle, Miami, New York, Vancouver, Bogotá, Atlanta

The Phenomenal Phallus and the Existential Womb

Existential therapy does not use the phallus to attempt to explain human behaviour. In a nutshell, existential therapists work with the premise that our activity and our competition is driven not by the phallus, but through fear of death. Our competition is driven by fear of loneliness and isolation. Our anxieties are driven by fear of responsibility. What we do and create are not acts of phallic competition, but are to cloak our essential aloneness, particularly at the moment of death: the pervasiveness of oblivion. We are terrified by the apparent meaninglessness of living, and in order to escape its futility, we act to endlessly clothe ourselves with a veil of meaning.

In fact, by replacing the phallus with the womb as the sublimating force, existential therapy and psychoanalytic theory might be made to dovetail.

We are always terrified of death, but there is one way to cheat death – birth. Our existential fear is not solely that we are frightened of death, but we are frightened of the prospect of not living on, of not giving birth. In this way the womb becomes an existential signifier for cheating death. Women have one, men don’t. The phallus is not an existential signifier: it is a phenomenal signifier. It signifies the phenomenon of creation, it is a tool of the phenomenal. A man can cope with the phenomenal through phallic discourses. But existentially, a man must somehow cope with the lack of womb. This lack of womb is an existential lack: the inability to cheat death, the absence of this uterine escape hatch.

Men are required for procreation, but their role is strangely distant and ‘hands-off’. In failing, at a deep and meaningful level, to acknowledge their true role in the collective escape from death, men become the architects of our world, attributing time for all activities they may need (As in this passage from Ecclesiastes, which may be discussed as a man-driven sublimation of the birth instinct, in a forthcoming post). All evidence of what Freudians attribute to phallic envy is in fact the manifestation of man’s attempt to defeat death in lieu of not having a womb. Of course they fail, as they can only recourse to use the phenomenal phallus, manifested in activity and ego, to approach the existential fear of birth (and its complement and counterpart death), manifested in the womb.

The Phallus and the Womb

Men create not because of the presence of the phallus,
but from the absence of the womb.

The human phenomenon that psychologists seek to explain is something like: Why do we behave how we behave? Why, for us alone, does doing seem to be so much more important than being? Why do we create, why do we strive, why do we compete, why do we destroy? What’s really going on?

Freudian psychoanalysis has a clear reason. The root is the phallus.

From birth the phallus, or lack of phallus, obsesses and possesses us. If we have one we are frightened we will be, first literally, and later metaphorically, castrated. If we don’t have one, we are covetous of the father’s phallus, and later give birth in order to produce a male heir and therefore possess this phallus. So powerful is the phallus, that women want to reproduce in order to get their hands on one.

In adulthood, this phallus continues to grip us (rather than the other way round) with its subversive demands. It pervades our desires and our actions. So suffuse is its power, according to psychoanalysts, that in an effort to maintain this Theory of Everything, they may tie themselves up in strange concepts and images like: “the woman has taken the phallus”, and “if you speak you may be castrated”. Most clients find such interpretations at best reductive, undermining the complexity of their experiences; and this jargon, these ex cathedra explanations, patronising. At worst it is incomprehensible or offensive. Some clients may find these interpretations powerful perhaps more from the graphic imagery than from any deep instinctive resonance with personal experience.

But if there is some element of physical sublimation, perhaps it is not the phallus, but the womb, wherein our fear is born.

A fact is that women give birth, men cannot. A woman (although not all choose to), can know that they have a purpose utterly fundamental for everything to exist. Reproduction is the definition of life, and women manifest it. Men can never experience the miracle of childbirth. It is this colossal inadequacy which triggers all the activity of men.

Why does culture exist, why do we create art: why was most of it done by men? Because men don’t give birth.
Why do we seek answers, why do we hunger for scientific progress: why are most scientists men? Because men don’t give birth.
Why do we cluster together into social groups, compete, build, organize, create laws, and rule: why are most rulers, philosophers and architects men? Because men don’t give birth.

Our fear is not of losing the phallus, it is an existential fear of death without reproduction (more on the existential connection to the womb forthcoming). This fear is not exclusively male, but it is men whose proximity to reproduction is not quite tangible. Having sex is not solely reproductive, and men are conditioned to want it without twinkles in their eyes. Pregnancy and birth are not normally present concerns to men. The whole process of insemination and childbirth is kept, as it were, at arm’s length from men. Women on the other hand are reminded monthly of their ability to conceive and of their virility.

So the fear of being sexually or phallically inadequate is in fact an existential fear about death and meaninglessness. Hence “castration anxiety” is in fact “sterility anxiety”. “Phallic competition” is in fact “reproductive competition”. Half the race feel disconnected from the reproductive purpose of life. They know this, and they know they will die. This is why being is not enough, and they revert to doing.

Instead of children, men give birth to the things they create. It is in this that they must prove themselves. They seek to suppress their anxiety of not having a womb by reproducing endlessly in the material world. Men cannot rely on any inherent tangible meaning, qua men. They have no qualities. So every activity becomes a need to prove one's worth. Life is a debt. Women can pay it off by giving birth. Men must pay it off by earning their value, proving their worth. This is the competition between men. It’s not the size of the phallus, it’s the size of the offspring.

To extend Freudian concepts, girls do not want to sleep with their fathers because they covet his phallus, but because they can reproduce with him. They are themselves evidence for his reproductive powers. Girls compete with their mothers not for the father’s phallus, but for his sperm. Boys do not want to sleep with their mothers and kill their fathers because of phallic envy, but because this would be the fastest and most obvious way to reproduce. “She had a baby for him (I am it), and now I overcome him and she will have a baby for me.” The notion of competitive dad is not about the fear of the son castrating the father, but that the son is virile and the father sterile.

How did Freud miss this incredibly obvious fact that women alone give birth, and attribute as the crux of his theory to the phallus and not the womb? Perhaps mostly we can attribute this massive oversight to his culture. All around him (and us) stand the works of men, the characteristics of men, great competing creations, artificial phalluses. Women were so rarely thought of that perhaps he simply overlooked them. So complete is man’s sublimation of his reproductive inadequacies that his creations and powers at the time of Freud (and all before him), had undermined the importance of women until they had no powers and little influence. As he looked about him, Freud saw the fruits of his gender’s loins. He saw sex manifesting as art and creation, death manifesting as destruction, and he saw it all happening at the hands of man. Of course therefore, it would be to a male characteristic that he would attribute all this. Men create, so it must be in man the cause of the creation. But it is not. Women, not men, hold in them the manifestation of the will to life.

Men create not because of the presence of the phallus, but from the absence of the womb.