The World as We Know It
Cristina Rose Moro
We see and experience the world through the lens of our fantasy. The world is therefore constructed—created and represented—through the screen of the fantasy, in which the subject is missing from the representation.[1] Lacan even goes so far as to say that the world is “but a dream of each body.”[2]
Lacan’s statement is profound. It suggests that the world is only ever the world as we know it, through our own singular lens. Further, Lacan tells us that we see only what concerns us, what looks back at us.[3] There are important implications with respect to knowledge and the gaze.
In « D’un regard, l’étrangeté », Jacques-Alain Miller refers to the experience Freud describes in “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” as an illustration of the gaze as uncanny.[4] After a lifetime of believing he would never see the Acropolis, Freud’s reaction to finally seeing it in person for the first time included a feeling of strangeness, almost derealization, as he notes: “So all this really does exist, just as we learned at school!”[5]
Miller reframes Freud’s analysis of the experience according to five stages: 1. “I’m told about the Acropolis [in school],” 2. “I don’t see the Acropolis when I’m told about it . . . I don’t see it from a living, in-person perception,” 3. “Given who I am, I’ll probably never see the Acropolis,” 4. “The Acropolis is invisible, invisible to me at least,” and 5. “The Acropolis doesn’t exist.”[6] It is a complex analysis, including what Miller refers to as Freud’s “stacked defenses.” He emphasizes that what holds everything together is Freud’s Oedipal guilt at having surpassed his father (who never saw Athens, never was as successful or worldly as Freud), around which Freud’s defenses formed. The result? The Acropolis doesn’t exist. It is impossible, can’t be known.
Miller further posits that “[t]he father’s reproachful gaze was such as to inspire Freud’s ‘What I see here is not real,’ which he defended himself against with his memory disorder.”[7] The gaze of the Other arises for Freud—more precisely, is conjured up—at a moment of jubilation or jouissance at the Acropolis. Freud refers to feelings of piety and guilt that blocked his enjoyment of the trip. The reproachful gaze is summoned precisely to limit an incestuous jouissance of viewing the beautiful splendor of the Acropolis his father never saw.
Freud’s experience at the Acropolis is a perfect example of the role of the gaze in mediating one’s experience of the world. Miller explains that “the father’s gaze arises in the Acropolis itself. It’s not so much that they see the Acropolis, but that the Acropolis looks back at them through the father’s eyes.”[8] Thus, what Freud sees or experiences is not the Acropolis, is not the world itself, it is the Other’s gaze as summoned up in encountering the Acropolis.
We are thus captives of the fantasy structure—and captives of, captivated by, the world as we know it through the lens of the fantasy. Until, perhaps, through analysis the fantasy is crossed and the objects fall…
References
[1] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A. Sheridan, New York/London: Norton, 1977, pp 221.
[2] Lacan, J., “Improvisation: Desire for Death, Dream and Awakening,” The Lacanian Review 15, 2024, p. 23.
[3] Like Lacan’s sardine can.
[4] Freud, S., “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” (1936), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII, London: Hogarth Press, 1961, pp. 237-248.
[5] Ibid., p. 241.
[6] Miller, J.-A., « D’un regard, l’étrangeté », La Cause du désir, no 102, juin 2019, p. 53.
[7] Ibid., p. 54.
[8] Ibid., p. 55.