Fetishing the object of your eye Fenichel and Freud

We quickly move from Modernism to psychoanalysis and the work of Freud and an article by Fenichel.

The guidance notes suggest reading the first part of Fenichel's chapter The scoptophilic instinct and identification in the course reader: Visual Culture: the Reader.

Not heard of "scoptophilic" before.  It appears to be synonymous with scopophilia, defined in Wikipedia as:

"Scopophilia or scoptophilia, from Greek "love of looking", is deriving pleasure from looking.  As an expression of sexuality, it refers to sexual pleasure derived from looking at erotic objects: erotic photographs, pornography, naked bodies, etc."

The Free dictionary uses a narrower definition based purely on libidinal pleasure:

"the deriving of sexual pleasure from viewing nude bodies, sexual acts, or erotic photographs; voyeurism".

Secondly, need a definition of identification. This is evidently a cornerstone of Freudian analysis, well known to anyone who has studied psychology, but new to me. The Wikipedia definition is as clear as required:

“a psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property, or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, by the model the other provides. It is by means of a series of identifications that the personality is constituted and specified.”

There seems to be a tacit assumption here that personality is derived solely by identification, a process of nurture as opposed to nature. We are not concerned here with that argument.

Fenichel starts by pointing out that someone "gazing intently" at an object means he or she is "devouring" it.  Uses example of wolf in Little Red Riding Hood or the snake that charms its victim..

Secondly, Fenichel says that looking at an object may be to grow like it, or force it to grow like oneself.

We now read Fetishism by Sigmund Freud on pp324-6 of the course reader. I have never read Freud before, my preconception is that much of his work seeks to demonstrate that psychological issues have deep and often hidden sexual causes. Let me confess immediately to a prejudice against this; not because I abhor the particular idea of sexual hang ups being the basis for psychological issues, more that it seems to me there are so many influences on us from both nature and nurture that it is unwise, perhaps unscientific, to isolate one. Doubtless, there are cases where a single factor could be the main cause of psychological disorder, but these will be restricted to particular people in a particular set of circumstances. I have a notion that Freud will find these and then by induction seek to theorize more generally.

Let's start with a definition of fetishism, not an easy task itself as there are several forms. The synopsis below is taken from a number of web based definitions, notably Marxist.org and psychologytoday.com.

At its most basic, a fetish is a belief that an inanimate object has human properties. Marx extended this definition to what he called 'commodity fetishism', resulting from the product of labour becoming divorced from the labour itself. More important to understand this article is sexual fetishism, defined in Psychology Today as a "pathological assignment of sexual fixation, fantasies or behaviours toward an inanimate object...or non genital body parts." Wool clothing is an example of the first, a foot the second. This fetishism can move in some quite unusual directions, such as a woman who married the Berlin Wall. 

Freud's article on fetishism takes a very particular thread from his observations of fetishism among a number of men. Freud observed that the fetish seemed not at all unusual or symptomatic to the men so were not concerned. In analysis, Freud found that the fetish was a substitute for the mother's penis that the man as a little boy believed she had. He refuses entirely to give up the notion, thus uses an object to replace it. Freud goes further; perhaps the male refused to give up the notion of a female penis because he feared she had been castrated.

This seems a fantastical notion. There is no science to this, Freud does not even say how many men he saw in order to arrive at his theory. There is no control group, and the notion is therefore non verifiable as a generality. The best one can say is that the theory has some applicability in some cases. 

Now revert back to Fenichel article. As I read this it becomes increasingly clear that this is a fairly advanced psychology paper. The article is verbose with much space taken up on difference between definitions of, for example, introjection and perception. It has some fantastical notions, such as that some “pregenitally fixated persons” read in the toilet in order to replace the matter that is being lost with fresh matter, or that an eye fixed in a stare stands for an erect penis (and that an eye can be a penis, vagina, or mouth). Some of the detail reflects the fact that Fenichel wrote in 1935, notably his allusion to nursery rhymes, and fears of being turned into stone. One could get too embroiled with the detail, and lose the essential messages relevant to visual culture. Lastly, it is evident that Fenichel is building on previous work, such as his definition of identification. We are, in a sense, merely dipping into an argument that has a progression pre and post dating this article.

Consequently, at this stage, I summarise only very briefly the points of the article that I deem to be the most relevant and understandable at this stage. It may be opportune to revisit at a later date.

•  The aim of the scoptophilic instinct is to look at the sexual object. This sounds tautologous, but it has value in explaining, for example, the desire to view pornography – Fenichel points out that anyone who wishes to view sexual activities really wishes to share them by a process of empathy;
•   The basis of the scoptophilic instinct is that we wish what we see to enter our body. Fenichel defines this process as ‘ocular introjection’, and takes place alongside introjections from other organs, the key difference being that ocular introjection is not necessarily real. This seems obvious, because the bran interprets visual signals, whereas breathing is instinctive.
• Fenichel notes that “man’s mechanical ingenuity has actually created a ‘devouring eye’....[namely]...the camera”. This is a very interesting point and raises the issues of what goes on in the author’s mind when taking images that some would view as voyeuristic. I discuss this more in the project.