Scopophilia
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. It can also be described as intermittent desire of gazing at.
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Psychoanalysis [edit]
The term was introduced to translate Freud's Schaulust, or pleasure in seeing.[1] Freud considered pleasure in looking to be a regular partial instinct in childhood,[2] which might be sublimated into interest in art, or alternatively become fixated into what the Rat man called "a burning and tormenting curiosity to see the female body".[3]
Freud thought that inhibition of scopophilia might lead to actual disturbances of vision;[4] other analysts have suggested that it might lead to a retreat from concrete objects into a world of abstractions.[5]
Scopophilia was developed in the psychoanalytic theorizing of Otto Fenichel,[6] with especial reference to identification. Fenichel maintained that "a child who is looking for libidinous purposes...wants to look at an object in order to 'feel along with him'".[7] He also explored how looking could substitute for acting in those anxious to avoid guilt.[8]
Jacques Lacan subsequently drew on Sartre's theory of the gaze to link scopophilia with the apprehension of the other: "the gaze is this object lost and suddenly refound in the conflagration of shame, by the introduction of the other".[9] Lacan privileged scopophilia in his theory of how desire is captured by the imaginary image of the other;[10] other French analysts have emphasised how the discovery of sexual difference in childhood, and the accompanying sense of not knowing subsequently fuels the scopophilic drive.[11]
Cinema [edit]
Building on Lacan's work,[12] scopophilia was used by cinema psychoanalysts of the 1970s to describe pleasures (often considered pathological[13]) and other unconscious processes occurring in spectators when they watch films. Voyeurism and the Male gaze have been seen as central elements in such mainstream cinematic viewing.[14]
Others however have objected to the element of scapegoating in such an analysis of the variegated pleasures of movie-viewing.[15]
Race [edit]
Critical race theorists, such as bell hooks,[16] David Marriott,[17] and Shannon Winnubst,[18] have also taken up scopophilia and the scopic drive as a mechanism to describe racial othering.
Here it is a question of fixing the appearance/identity of the other through the gaze, cultural scopophilia restricting the visible representations of racial identity that it privileges and/or allows.[19]
Literary examples [edit]
- The Satyricon of Gaius Petronius Arbiter is pervaded with scopophilia, as when a priestess of Priapus was "the first to put an inquisitive eye to a crack she had naughtily opened, and spy on their play with prurient eagerness".[20]
See also [edit]
References [edit]
- ^ Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1994) p. 194
- ^ Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality (PFL 7) p. 109-10
- ^ Quoted in Sigmund Freud, Case Histories II (PFL 9) p. 41-2
- ^ Sigmund Freud, On Psychopathology (PFL 10) p. 112-3
- ^ Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946) p. 177
- ^ " The Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification," by Otto Fenichel (1953) ISBN 0-393-33741-3, [1]
- ^ Fenichel, Theory p. 71
- ^ Fenichel, Theory p. 348
- ^ Lacan, p. 183
- ^ Jacques Lacan, Television (1990) p. 86
- ^ Stuart Schneiderman, Returning to Freud (1980) p. 224
- ^ "The Money Shot", by Jane Mills (2001) ISBN 1-86403-142-5, p. 223
- ^ "Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television", by John Thornton Caldwell (1995) ISBN 0-8135-2164-5, p. 343
- ^ J. Childers/G. Hentzi, The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1995) p. 316-7
- ^ R. Miklitsch, Roll Over Adorno (2006) p. 93-4
- ^ "Eating the Other", Bell Hooks (2006) ISBN 1-4288-1629-1
- ^ "Bordering On: The Black Penis," by David Marriott (1996), Textual Practice 10(1), pp. 9-28.
- ^ "Is the Mirror Racist?: Interrogating the Space of Whiteness", by Shannon Winnubst (2006) ISBN 0-253-21830-6, [2]
- ^ Todd W. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory (2011) p. 164-5
- ^ Petronius, The Satyricon 9Penguin 1986) p. 50 and p. 188
Further reading [edit]
- John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)
- Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (1989)
