MIND MOVES: Shoes are not an exclusively female fixation, as last week's article on the subject might imply. For an equal, if different, psychology applies to how the male chooses to be shod. Indeed, if psychology has been inattentive to female footwear, it has been utterly neglectful of the male.
This is because the manner in which man "bestrides the narrow world like a Colossus" and the footwear he requires to do so give much information into his attitudes and aspirations.
The original image of the male biped is a powerful one. Man's foot unadorned, large, splayed and strong. And when he first stood up upon his own two feet, he began a special skilled species-specific journey. With hunting agility, he created his earliest shoes, fashioning the animal skins of his prey upon his feet. Since then, step by step, he has marked, measured and progressed upon this earth and beyond.
Think of the lunar landing in 1969, when Neil Armstrong, stepping out upon the surface of the moon, took "one small step for man" and "one giant leap for mankind". This brings to mind the words of another man, Longfellow, on how the lives of great men all remind us how "we can make our lives sublime and departing leave behind us footprints on the sands of time".
But there have been other less noble occasions when man has put his foot down, and has marched in military stomping synchronicity to war. From the Roman sandalled centurion to the current combat boot, soldiers have been uniformly shod and sent to fight as echoed in Rudyard Kipling's account of the Infantry Columns "foot-slog-slog-slog-sloggin' over Africa, boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down".
Think of the polished killing proficiency of the brutal black-booted Nazi machine: the abandoned shoes of tiny children in the death camps of Auschwitz or Dachau. Too many men have "died with their boots on" and too many women have waited for the footsteps of a beloved husband or son who never made it home.
But the boot is on the other foot when it comes to fashion, whereby it becomes a wader, a Wellington, or the riding boot associated with an ascendancy class, to whom ill-shod men once tipped their caps in servitude.
In fact, the history of footwear highlights the degree to which what one could afford to put on one's feet was often determined by wealth, rank and class. For example, in 17th century France, Louis XIV being of short stature wore high heels - shoes he did not permit the populace to wear - while in 18th century England the low laced leather Oxford shoe, tied over the instep, became an Oxford don favourite, and an international standard for male footwear thereafter.
But one must not neglect the many other fashions by which men's shoes define the man: the implied promiscuity of the pointy toe, the sensual empathy of rounded shoes, the dominance of the durable heel, the Dandyism of men who chose dainty wear, while even today the cowboy boot remains beloved of women when worn by their men.
The 1920s saw the Gatsby style two-tone spectator shoe, the winklepickers of the 1950s are memorable, and who could forget Elvis Presley's gyrating musical injunction that you do anything to him but step on his blue suede shoes?
Nor has art neglected men's boots and shoes given the vibrancy of Van Gogh's boots and Andy Warhol's "shoes, shoes, shoes" to name but a few. Religion recognises shoe symbols, washing and anointing of feet, fitness to tie a lace, the shoes of the fisherman, the monastic sandal, a father's provision of footwear for his prodigal son and the miracle of He who walked upon the earth and sea.
While entering Buddhist monasteries and Muslim mosques, men leave their shoes outside to keep them clean for prayer.
Freud, inevitably, found something fetish and phallic in feet and shoes but he is not alone in seeing their analytic significance. For it is with his feet that man touches the earth and the psychological power behind the Irish male bróg is immortalised in poem and play and tale.
Consider the lonely boots on the empty stage in Beckett's Waiting for Godot and how Estragon and Vladimir subsequently discover that trying on boots can "pass the time" and be an "occupation, a recreation, a relaxation".
His Uncle Manus's brown shoes with worn down heels appear in Seamus Dean's novel Reading in the Dark. Poet Máirtín Ó Direáin commemorates the purchase of a child's first pair of shoes and all the steps those feet will take thereafter. Seamus Heaney's blackberry picking tells how "briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots". And no account of men's boots could omit Heaney's tributes to his father's work, ploughing and digging, while he, a child, followed him, stumbling "in his hob-nailed wake" or watching as "the coarse boot nestled on the lug". And surely grief must be an empty shoe in which a man will walk no more.
Shoes have a sturdy psychological significance for men, binding them to one another, fathers beside sons, standing firmly together on terra firma. There is a gift bestowed or a burden placed upon men who must follow in their father's footsteps. But if men must walk a distance in their father's shoes, what steps must fathers take for their sons to follow?
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview