The Gaze as the Rock of Castration

Dana Tor-Zilberstein

“The split between gaze and vision will enable us, you will see, to add the scopic drive to the list of the drives. […] we shall see that Freud already places this drive to the fore in Triebe und Triebschicksale (‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’),and shows that it is not homologous with the others. Indeed, it is this drive that most completely eludes the term castration.”[1]

This quote by Lacan has some serious implications. The scopic drive introduces a drive that is not subject to castration, i.e., it cannot be interpreted with the symbolic, it is at work, and will always be.  

In “A Child is Being Beaten” Freud shows us that the fantasy has a grammatical structure, but it does not offer itself to interpretation, Jacques-Alain Miller emphasizes, it begins with a silence.[2] My hypothesis is that this fantasy begins with a silent gaze, which is reconstructed in the sentence that is still heard today by analysts, mostly spoken by hysterics: “I have seen my father beating my younger brother.” This gaze is the first constituent of the fantasy, and I would say that it is the part which is impervious to interpretation. It is amazing to hear how patients who swear to have a non-violent father share this memory, this one incident of violence of their father beating their younger brother.   

The treatment of the fantasy, says Miller, has nothing to do with interpretation, but with construction. This is why, he says, it was chosen as the place where the pass takes place.[3] The fantasy does not lend itself to interpretation, as it does not bow its head to the symbolic, but, as Miller puts it, “occupies the place of the real,”[4] where we can also situate the gaze, that which eludes castration.

At the end of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus plucks out his eyes. In his search for the ‘truth,’ he has discovered the enactment of his fantasy in real life, which has led him to isolate this object at the heart of the fantasy in an act of self-mutilation. In a contemporary version of Oedipus Rex being performed in Ha’Cameri theatre in Tel Aviv these days, he punctures his own eyes with Jocasta's high heels. It is an original interpretation because the heel is a fetish object. In the current version, Oedipus turns to this fetish object. Why would he do this? Perhaps this fetish object acts as a screen in the sense of mediation between the subject and the real of castration, to escape this real? This new interpretation might suggest that Oedipus does not want to see beyond the screen, which has constituted his fantasy. It would be a last-ditch defense against the real. 

If “A Child is being Beaten” presents the structure of the fantasy, the gaze presents the prototype for object a. Maybe we could say that instead of extracting our own eyes like Oedipus, at the end of analysis, one  extracts his own way of seeing the world, the object a which determines the fantasy, i.e., the gaze. Or, one would attest to his way of doing with it, with that which eludes, and cannot be passed.

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, p 78.

[2] Miller J.-A., « Symptôme- Fantasme », La Cause Du Désir 114, 2023, p. 74.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.