Clare has always been a conciliator and a populist. Temperamentally, he seems genuinely reluctant to offend, unwilling to browbeat or assert without being completely secure in his facts - the book's admirable opening sentence, "As I get older and perhaps wiser, I realise more and more what I do not know", is very characteristic. The emollient intimacies of his long-running series In The Psychiatrist's Chair have been perfect for BBC Radio 4, bridging the gap between the easygoing celebrity interview and something much less flirtatious and more unsettling.
To his detractors, there's something a bit Delia Smith about Clare - a bit limelight-hungry and ingratiating. His gift is to be exquisitely sympathetic, fluently thoughtful, not confrontational or revelatory or profound. What he does makes excellent and often compulsive listening, but it's a long way from the disturbing, strenuous, driven, ground-breaking, quasi-medicine-cum-quasi-magic of the great psychiatric thinkers such as Freud, Jung, Adler or Klein.
That there's a tougher, more thoroughgoing and aggressive wisdom underpinning Clare's philosophy is obvious almost at once on reading On Men. Clare describes a mood of apparently deepening sexual mistrust, in which women are enjoying a process of political and biological emancipation. Meanwhile men, emasculated by the science that allows women to conceive children without them, find themselves increasingly attacked, marginalised and psychically wounded. Yet the crisis the book talks of isn't really one of masculinity but one of faith, or lack of it. Ultimately, as Clare sees it, the problem for the world isn't old-fashioned phallic masculinity or the consequences of male violence, arrogance and intimidation, but something simpler that crosses the sexual barrier - hatred itself.
It's this informing perception that lifts his theme above fashionable panic. Much of Clare's knottily detailed analysis is an attempt to prove, in the face of what he regards as an inherently threatening gender-politicised feminist climate, that certain basic things are true. That divorce isn't necessarily the best solution for couples at loggerheads, as one-parent apologists have claimed; that children from divorced families tend not to perform as well educationally or emotionally; that the now fashionably redundant father is better present than absent; and that there's an innate psychodynamic weakness in the single-parent family that makes it an unreliable ideal.
Seeking an accommodation, a healing therapy of mutual respect capable of resolving these long-entrenched divisions, he argues powerfully against the purely chemical or biological determinism that holds that men are the helpless, testosterone-fuelled prisoners of their genes. Instead, he returns masculinity to its source in the family - to love, mutual respect and the primary creative role that both sexes undertake in the rearing of children.
One of the attractive features of On Men is how little actual psychiatry it contains. Clare prefers to deal with the sociological implications of masculine behaviour. The part-science and part-shamanism of psychiatric thinking has always had its wilfully blind side. Just as in a religious age the workings of chance and organic illness were ascribed to the will of God, so the psychotherapeutic creeds of the past 100 years - which distrust the purely accidental as much as the conventionally religious used to do - make the mind or the psyche conjecturally responsible for everything that the body feels or is obliged to sustain.
We live, as a result, in a stubbornly psychosomatic era, seeing in all our malaise and misfortune some rectifiable dysfunction of our individual selves. Yet, as Clare slowly but relentlessly establishes, part of our trouble is that we look inward too complacently, ignoring too easily the collective cultural conditions that lie mostly beyond the scope of personal therapy.
"We spend money on killing machines and wonder why our youngsters are so aggressive. We insist our children, from the earliest years, familiarise themselves with the intricacies of human biology, yet ensure they learn little or nothing of psychology until their own personalities are distorted beyond correction. And, rather than acknowledge the neglect we have shown towards structures such as marriage and family life, we resort to undermining their importance in the sum of human health and happiness." There's a salutary anger in this, as well as a loathing of dogma and a fine, sane, bristling common sense.
