Hands: What We Do With Them – and Why by Darian Leader – review

Hardly a day goes by without someone fretting about when automation is going to take away our jobs, how the only realities now are increasingly virtual and why digital devices have made us unable to concentrate. Psychoanalyst Darian Leader’s suggestion as to how we should think about these cultural transformations is nothing if not bold and original. “What if,” he asks, “rather than focusing on the new promises or discontents of contemporary civilisation, we see today’s changes as first and foremost changes in what human beings do with their hands?”

That “first and foremost” means the suggestion cannot be taken both literally and seriously. Asking if hands are the right place to start to explain the rise of social media, for example, is a non-starter. The question is better read as genuinely hypothetical, an invitation to embark on a kind of thought experiment that may or may not generate new insights on our contemporary condition.

Taken in this spirit, Leader’s book throws up many fascinating observations about the ways in which “keeping our hands busy has always been a central human activity” while idle ones have been condemned as the tools of Satan.

In the 18th century, waving a fan was so popular that “by 1710 there were around 300 different makers in London and there was even a fan tax at mid-century”. We may moan now about how people permanently clutch their mobile phones, but back then people made the same complaints about the new technologies of the notebook and watch. A satirical advertisement in the Spectator of 1712 offered “classes on how to hold snuffboxes and take them out of the pocket in the most fashionable way”.

Gestures were even more important in Cicero’s times, when Roman orators paid as much attention to how they moved their hands as they did to their words, with the splay of the fingers and the angle of the hand all carefully planned.

Having decided to think of everything in relation to hands “first and foremost”, however, Leader becomes like the religious monomaniac who sees a crucifix in every perpendicular intersection of lines. This compulsive seeing of signs is compounded by the psychoanalytic imagination, which equates straightforward explanations with superficial ones, even when all that most matters is clearly visible on the surface.

For example, he asks: “Why is it that in almost every adventure film ever made there is a scene in which one person holds another dangling by the hand?” To which I found myself answering: try gripping someone with your teeth or toes. The cinematic trope’s popularity has nothing to do with the deep significance of hands and everything to do with the tense drama of life hanging by a thread, helpless and utterly dependent. Hands are by far and away our most dexterous body parts and that simple truth explains most of why they feature so much in our lives, art and literature.

Still, there are enough thought-provoking ideas to keep the book in the reader’s hands, such as the prediction that our myriad new ways of manipulating smartphones and gadgets will change our physiology, just as the knife changed our mouths, so that our edge-to-edge chomp became our current overbite. However, Leader is most interesting when not talking specifically about hands at all. He suggests that our increased tendency to talk about our problems as “addictions” is indicative of the more potent “autonomy addiction” that lies behind it: “the illusion that we can be fully masters of ourselves”. Similarly pointed is his complaint that many of us devoted to healthy living fall foul of Samuel Johnson’s complaint that “while you are making the choice of life, you neglect to live”.

Leader’s several references to knitting exemplify both his talent for acute observation and his fondness for hidden explanations. He notes the irony that while knitting today is celebrated as a reaction against passive consumerism towards active creation, its appeal is also explained in precisely the same values that drive the consumer society: “The importance of personal choice, the sense of autonomy, the search for pleasure and a work of self-improvement.” Rather than casting off there, however, Leader later goes on to claim we knit not only to make and create, but to “ward off, to block, to keep in check, and, perhaps, fundamentally to bind”. I think he drops a stitch here because still later he notes that the most common activity for listening psychoanalysts is not note-taking but knitting, which is now not a blocking mechanism but simply a way for the therapist’s hands to stay occupied in order to help concentration.

Working with our hands is supposed to keep us grounded in practical, straightforward, earthy reality. For Leader, working on our hands seems to have the exact opposite effect. That determination to leave common sense behind is the source of his book’s joys and frustrations, as inseparable here as they are in the psychoanalyst’s chair.

Hands: What We Do With Them – and Why is published by Hamish Hamilton (£12.99). Click here to buy it for £10.39