THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BOND

From "The Psychoanalysis of 007"
by Fausto Antonini:

"There is in Bond a puberty psychology: it is not aggressively male, it is not romantically passionate, concentrated, uniderectional, forcible and total: his love is adolescent, broadmindedly lucid and conscious, certain, but also ingenuously, generously available, multidirectional; his love induces tenderness (sometimes sisterly or maternal) that is not without turbid, turgid, but disarmed and disarming sexuality, induces comprehension, sympathy, amenable sweet-bitter availability."
"But Bond is also essentially a man; a solitary, taciturn, moderately austere man. Naturally 007, like any hero, cannot have a wife (the married man, as Kierkegaard testified, is the archetypal image of the general, of the universal logical-moral undifferentiated, antithetical to that of the cavalier of the faith who lives in singular and unrepeatable absolute rapport with the absolute): he marries, an hour later he is already widowed..."
"... The psychology of Fleming finds exact confirmation, as the brilliant success of his creations show, in several diffuse components of common psychology: it is possible to relish the prohibited savour of the victories and of the sexual conquest only in the excitement of sadism and of the punishment (even if the 'punishment' precedes the victories and conquests). The femininity oscillates between the masculine and sometimes lesbian frigidity, the fleeting pleasure flavoured with greedy, avid haste, and the voluptuous and suffering fusion of possession and of the sadistic-masochistic disillusion..."

"... With Bond contemporary man attempts his greatest evasion: the evasion into action, into the immediate and radical negation of the sense of guilt, into the prevalence of vision and of action over hearing, of muscular action over reflection, of the sense over conscience, of eros over everything (eros has become absolute security: it is possible to love sexually even in the presence of mortal danger)..."

"... Naturally a man psychically adult and spiritually mature can only be interested in the adventures of 007 critically, retaining the bitter delusion of infantile squalor of this puppet character. But in the singular phenomenon of his success there is also an invocation to the collective psyche, which is affectionately, studiously attended and listened to, interpreted and favoured, and never denied or betrayed. It is an urgent invocation of vital liberty and therefore it is sacred like any profound frank expression of the will to live by living nature."

- Published in The Bond Affair (Il Caso Bond), 1965, by Casa Ed. Valentino Bompiani



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