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PARTISAN REVIEW
Needless to say, the authentic interchange, the authenticity event, is
only infrequently experienced. Local communities do have occasional flashes
of this feeling of people really sharing with each other-usually during
periods of crisis when the community is threatened from outside . But micro–
communities (and these would include the family) can bear moments of
mutual self-disclosure only as periodic upheavals below the surface of day–
to-day order. Yet no matter how infrequently we can actually experience
GemeinschaJt,
we persistently seek it out, measuring real social relations
by this ideal which can be sustained only in imagination. What I want to
show here is why the very idea of self-disclosure, the authenticity event, the
open community, is destructive. This ideal makes our real social relations
seem sterile, and often poisons human relationships by creating a sense of
crisis which can be resolved only if the persons involved abandon each other.
My critique does not assert that
GemeinschaJt
is destructive per se, but
attempts to indicate why changes in modern society have made it so. These
changes involve the redefinition of nineteenth-century eroticism into twen–
tieth-century sexuality, and the transformation of privacy as it was under–
stood in the last century into a new idea of intimacy.
EROTICISM TRANSFORMED INTO SEXUALITY
When we think of our great-grandparents' experiences of physical love,
we are most likely to think about the inhibitions and repressions. Victorian
bourgeois prudery was so extreme it occasionally acquired an almost surreal
quality; a common practice, for instance, was to cover the legs of grand
pianos with leggings, because a bare leg as such was thought' .provocative. "
This prudery lay at the root of a number of psychopathologies especially
acute at the time-not only hysterias, but also what the Victorians called
"complaints," which among women were manifested by such symptoms
as uncontrollable vomiting at the sight of menstrual blood and among men
by such symptoms as acute attacks of anxiety after the discovery of an ejacu–
lation occurring during sleep . Certainly no one today could possibly hope
for a return to such repression. Yet it is important to see the rationale behind
this sexual repression and even to comprehend a certain dignity among
bourgeois men and women in these Puritanical struggles with themselves.
A code of eroticism ruled nineteenth-century bourgeois consciousness, an
eroticism composed of three elements.
The first of these elements was the belief that states of feeling and signs
of character manifest themselves involuntarily. Hence, what is deeply felt
or deeply rooted in character is beyond the power of the will to shape or
hide: emotion appears unbidden, and at moments of vulnerability emotion
