by Mervyn Jones
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APPEARANCE
14:38-14:45
IDENTITY
Holding On by Mervyn Jones, a former communist, is a highly praised account of the lives of a series of London’s dock workers (specifically, the Wheelwright family) before, during, and after the second world war. The growth of opportunity, the loss of community.
SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE
I can’t find much about the book, so I wonder if (beyond the mild invocation of WWII) Kubrick was inspired to include it to connect us to Mervyn’s father, Ernest.
Ernest Jones was a lifelong friend and colleague of Sigmund Freud. He was the first English-speaking psychoanalyst. He was somewhere at the heart of the famous Jones-Freud controversy. Basically, a friend of his, Melanie Klein, differed from Anna Freud’s theory of child analysis (Klein thought play was more helpful, and Anna Freud thought that educative intervention (“I…corrected them, sir…”) was best), and this lead to much acrimony, which Jones later smoothed over. But also, Jones coined the term phallocentrism, as a critique of Freud’s penis envy concept. With Klein, Jones argued for a “primary femininity” saying that penis envy wasn’t as Freud said, resulting from a sense of “injury” thanks to biological asymmetry, but rather as a defensive formation (I admire Freud’s genius sometimes, but…seriously…). Jones dismissed the old castration complex, and came up with “aphanisis” to describe the fear of “the permanent extinction of the capacity (including opportunity) for sexual enjoyment.” I hope it’s easy to see how this plays into the film. And I would accept the critique that Ernest Jones is only indirectly referenced through his son.
Also, there’s a 1977 TV version.
Next literary reference: The Tower
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EYE SCREAM 