Reduced to an Eye

Virgínia Carvalho

When Freud decided to investigate the “infantile beating-phantasies” in 1919, he pointed to the look as what remains on the third and terminal phase of this fantasy: “a child is being beaten. I am probably looking on.”[1] After this, it “has strong and unambiguous sexual excitement attached to it.”[2] According to Lacan, this is the subject reduced to its most extreme point of being a mere onlooker: being reduced to an eye. That is a fundamentally desubjectivized situation and here the subject is no more than “a screen upon which the subject is established.”[3]

From the imaginary forest of fantasies to a “scar” which determines the way of being in the world, the fundamental fantasy results in the delimitation of an inscription that highlights what remains as fixation in a privileged setting (image and script) in which the subject finds support for their satisfactions.

In 1966, Lacan notes that fantasy is structured as a sentence, with a grammatical structure and an axiomatic logic: $<>a.[4]For him, no commentary or metalanguage will account for what is introduced by the formula “a child is being beaten.” That happens because such a sentence does not need to be commented on, since it shows itself, just like a drive montage. There is a difference between to play with fantasy and to talk about it.[5] In treatment, it is spoken with imprecision and, when it is formulated, it brings out difficulty, aversion, disgust, and guilt in patients, as Freud has pointed out in 1919. It’s easier to talk about symptoms than to talk about fantasy.

Lacan emphasizes the function of the whip in the beating fantasy, considering it almost as a paradigm of the relationship to the Other´s desire: “Human beings, as such, are all under the stick.”[6] This submission has to do with submission to language, as we can see in Magritte’s artwork The Human Condition, which highlights human submission to representation. For Lacan, the whip is both an index of submission to the desire of the Other, as well as the object that the subject uses to be in relation to the Other. It stages the paradox of satisfaction that is jouissance. In this sense, the fundamental fantasy is the screen that covers up the real, but also the window that allows access to it.[7]

The fantasy tries to capture the gaze, like a framework to the drive. While neurosis imprisons jouissance, analysis can allow the traversal of the fantasy’s framework and “after the mapping of the subject in relation to the object a, the experience of the fundamental fantasy becomes the drive.”[8]

From 1919 to the present day, what changes can we notice in fantasy? In contemporaneity, fantasies are ready-made and available, prêt-à-porter, in one click, for everybody. The subject is always looking at and being looked at through gadget screens: reduced to an eye. The image is fetishized, and the object is elevated to the zenith.[9] Considering the connection between the fantasy and the gaze, we might learn something about the gaze by locating and reading the manifestations of fantasies in the subjectivity of our time.

References

[1] Freud, S., “A Child is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions,” (1919), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII, London: Hogarth Press, 1961, p.195.

[2] Ibid. p. 186.

[3] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV: The Object Relation, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A. R. Price, Cambridge: Polity, 2020, p.110.

[4] Lacan, J., Le Séminaire, livre XIV: La Logique du Fantasme. Paris: Seuil & Champ Freudien, 2023, p.12.

[5] Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book IV, op.cit., p.107.

[6] Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book V: The Formations of the Unconscious, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A.R. Price, Cambridge: Polity, 2017, p.226.

[7] Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book X: Anxiety, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A.R. Price, Cambridge: Polity, 2014.

[8] Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A. Sheridan, New York/London: Norton, 1977, p.273.

[9] Miller, J.-A, (2004) “A Fantasy,” Lecture given at the IVth Congress of the WAP, available online: http://2012.congresoamp.com/en/template.php?file=Textos/Conferencia-de-Jacques-Alain-Miller-en-Comandatuba.html