In “Sex in Public”, by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, the authors discuss how queer culture can survive and promote itself in a world of heteronormativity. The process described here reminds me of Louis Althusser’s idea of reproduction, in which “every social formation must reproduce the[…]existing relations of production”(Althusser 1336), meaning that an ideology must have a way of interpellating new subjects in order to survive. However, unlike Althusser, Berlant and Warner describe a situation in which a counter-hegemonic culture attempts to reproduce and survive.

Fittingly, the authors tell us of current (and by current I mean about 2o years ago) politics regarding queer institutions: “senators such as Ted Kennedy and Jesse Helms support amendments that refuse federal funds to organizations that ‘promote[…]sadomasochism, homo-eroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or any individuals engaged in sexual intercourse'”(Berlant and Warner 2602). Althusser tells us that ideology is primarily promoted through the ISAs, which, in general, reproduce the mindset needed to support the current hegemony without the need of force. By attempting to cut off the institutions that would promote the “queer ideology”, these senators are attempting to cut off queer culture’s ability to reproduce itself, and therefore reduce its power. The zoning laws described in this essay do this by reducing the amount of physical space devoted to queer culture and, furthermore, put this “ideology” in a negative and degrading light.

Berlant and Warner’s idea of privatization of intimacy also does this, not only to those who are queer, but also heterosexual couples as well. It makes “sex seem irrelevant or merely personal, heteronormative conventions of intimacy block the building of nonnormative or explicit public sexual cultures.”(Berlant and Warner 2604). By keeping heteronormative institutions and practices in place, and attempting to remove individualized accounts of sexuality from the public sphere, heteronormativity becomes the only acceptable version of sexual life, to the point where even heterosexual couples must hide the fact that they enjoy using vibrators (Berlant and Warner 2614).

Even powerful ISAs, such as the media, are criticized for discussing problems within heterosexual culture. The problems within heterosexual relationships are often discussed on talk shows and in journalism. Even though these mediums rarely state the problem to be heteronormative culture, there is still a backlash against publicizing the problems within these relationships: “‘We’ve forgotten that civilization depends on keeping some of this stuff under wraps,’ he [William Bennett] said”(Berlant and Warner 2607). “Civilization”, in Bennett’s sense here, seems to be upheld by hiding the fact that heteronormativity produces public problems that many people suffer from, rather than issues that only a few, abnormal individuals face. Heteronormative culture is promoted in part by hiding the problems and cracks within it, creating dissatisfaction for both heterosexual and queer people.

Like I said in the first paragraph, ideology and the public’s relationship to it must be reproduced in order to survive. In “Sex in Public”, Berlant and Warner call this “world-making”, in which “Making a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation. These intimacies do bear a necessary relation to a counter public- an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation”(Berlant and Warner 2609). Traditional ISAs, in Althusser’s sense, are found in physical, relatively permanent space. Churches, schools, even media all inhabit physical, well-frequented places in which they can encounter the public. Beyond the physical, common and well-acknowledged social practices, such as paying taxes or getting divorced, further promote heteronormativity. These long-standing institutions and practices help to instill a social memory of of the dominant sexual practices and ideas, which in turn reproduce them. The laws and political actions against queer culture mentioned earlier attempt to erase the social memory of queer practices.

So then, how does queer culture promote and reproduce itself if it cannot do so in the standard ways that Althusser enumerates? Street is an interesting example of how queer culture is able to survive. It is noted that not everyone who frequents this area does so for explicitly sexual reasons, and yet because sexually-oriented businesses thrive here, a queer culture can develop within this physical space. The economic success of these businesses allow for the street to become queer (Berlant and Warner 2612), creating a mass centered around an area that suddenly has political power because of its concentration geographically. Maybe queer culture cannot reproduce itself through Althusser’s ISAs, as it is not the dominant ideology, but it finds a way through the creation, through sex commerce, of a meeting space where queer people can collect.

Disappointing, I know. I’ve been thinking about how to begin discussion of Zizek! and wanted to get at the all-important “so what?” question. Amid all the charming examples of love gone awry from Hollywood in the essay, we can lose sight of why it matters that “courtly love” is still with us, that the Other we desire is a “black hole” whom we constitute as such through the “detours” of our own desiring, and so on.

I think the pithiest way to put this is that a) “courtly love” is a trap, in which the “knight” gets lost in narcissistic projections and the Lady vanishes altogether; that b) love as a “contract” between equals (i.e., the way most of us think about our erotic relationships most of the time, at least in the abstract) is also a fiction, since each of us is “the Thing” for the other and, as such, subject to all kinds of distortions via the circuitry of narcissistic projection already discussed.

This psychoanalytic dynamic is what led Lacan to claim “there is no sexual relationship.” By this he doesn’t mean that no one has sex (obviously) but that what unfolds in erotic life is not a reciprocal “relationship” between equals. This essay from the journal Lacan Ink lays out the logic of this; you might get lost in the weeds on the finer points of Lacan’s thinking here, but the works of art (and especially the beer commercial) help to bring the broad point home.

In Sigmund Freud’s “Fetishism”, men have a fear of castration that is repressed into the unconscious. As a way to cope, men subconsciously creates a fetish, a coping mechanism to deal with the fear. Men turn a non-genital body part or an object and gives that item value. Consciously, they will see that valued object—a fetish, whether it be a nose or a shoe, as an object of sexuality. A sexuality that they are satisfied with and as Freud states, “even praise the way in which it eases their erotic life” (841).

Freud explains that the fetish is a substitute for the penis— a particular and special penis, that had been lost in early childhood. Fetishes exist, in order to preserve the penis that had been lost. He continues to explain, “the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and— for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up” (842). Men go through this trauamatic event and use scotomization to forget, replace, and repress this event. The traumatic event is the realization that women (specifically their mother) are actually castrated by the father and in result, creates this fear of his own castration. He can then preserve his altered belief that women have a phallus, but, the phallus is not the same as before, and has substituted and become something else. That non-genital body part or item has become their fetish, which is a symbolic representation of a penis. Men give value to that fetish and immerses a part of themselves into the fetish. It becomes so that when they see the fetish item, consciously, it creates a sexual desire and arousal for it. In result, unconsciously, men lose the fear of castration because that fetish is a symbol of a penis. It eases their uncanny feelings.

Freud continues to say that “no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital” (843). There is this generalization and continuous idea Freud makes that all men are afraid of seeing the genitals of a female. While some, choose to repress and fetishize, others turn to homosexuality. Yet is is striking because fetishes can applied and created by anyone. A homosexual as well as a woman can also fetishize objects or non-genital body parts. Freud does not go into detail about the fetishes of homosexuals and females and how it is applied to them. Freud closes his writing with, “the normal prototype of fetishes is a man’s penis, just as the normal prototype of inferior organs is a woman’s real small penis, the clitoris” (845). Freud’s analysis raises a few questions. Should men have a castration fear if women do have a penis yet is just a really small one? Why do men believe that it is their father who castrated them? Lastly, what is this penis obsession and fixation that Freud has?

Jacques Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage As Formative” discusses this stage that we go through as babies in which he refers to this as the “mirror stage” and how this stage can carry on throughout adulthood. He first starts off by using what he calls “comparative psychology” and he does this by comparing the intellect of a child to the intellect of a chimp. For instance he says, “The child, at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone, by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recognize as such his own image in a mirror. This recognition is indicated in the illuminative mimicry of the Aha-Erlebnis, which Kohler sees as the expression of situational apperception, an essential stage of the act of intelligence.” (1164) He then points out this sense of nature vs. nurture thing where animals, such as the monkey, imitate the reflection of images around it which in this case is nature, kind of something like an animal instinct that carries on through their adulthood as full-grown monkeys. Whereas the child will learn through the what they are taught and through experience rather than natural instinct because once upon a time we were all babies and as children we learned through a reflection of what we see around us and what we were taught which does carry on with us through our adult lives. This is where I can see why this is referred or being compared to a mirror because through life we see a reflection of ourselves not always knowing what others may see us as. From birth we are taught to be a certain kind of way and we learn through what our parents taught us and through experience rather than this natural instinct like the monkey. And that’s why I can also see how Lacan is tying this notion together with using the example of a child looking at its reflection in the mirror because babies look at this reflection trying to figure out the image in front them and the emotions behind and kind of lack this sense of self as he explains in his analysis. They lose this sense of self because they do not know how to interpret this reflection of themselves and this carries into adulthood because we continue to see images of thing and even look in the mirror today and not know what is going on and try to figure out this world surrounding us. Unlike the chimp, we have this perception of ourselves and we know that others have this perception of us and its natural human instinct to wonder what that is and the chimp does not have a clue nor really wonder what another’s perspective is of themselves. Finally, this is what Lacan is trying to convey to us we have and still go through this mirror stage where we look at ourselves and reflect on what we are and the image we see in the mirror.

Obviously, I am no psychologist or even a psych major for that matter so my opinion is not an educated one but I think Freud’s theory is… odd. Freud’s theory on fetishism is confusing to be honest. To me, it seems really far-fetched but I can’t pretend to understand such deep psychological issues as these.

Freud addresses the shoe as a sexual object of fetishism in his essay in which he defines a fetish as “a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up”. Freud continues to more specifically address the shoe as an object of fetishism and he says “…the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish—or a part of it—to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up, fur and velvet—as has long been suspected—are a fixation of the sight of the pubic hair, which should have been followed by the longed-for sight of the female member; pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish, crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic”. Ergo, according to Freud, the shoe is fetishized by young males from an early age in order to justify the mother’s lack of penis in a male dominated society. However, if this was truly case even the most beat up pair of crusty flip flops would be fetishized so long as they provided a reminder of that first glimpse of the mother’s lack of penis.

Freud makes a valid observation: “fetish is recognized by its adherents as an abnormality, it is seldom felt by them as the symptom of an ailment accompanied by suffering. Usually they are quite satisfied with it, or even praise the way in which it eases their erotic life.” I think this statement is valid for all things and interests that can be considered peculiar or “other” in the way that society often tends to ignore them but it doesn’t change the fact that they exist and people find pleasure and often joy from these things, regardless of whether they are ignored or not. Thus, Freud found that the fetish “made its appearance in analysis as a subsidiary finding.”

Freud did not bother to discuss fetishism in women, he discusses only fetishism in men. He claims that it is derived from a man’s fantasy from when he was a boy that his mom had had a penis but that it had been cut off, which leads to men’s apparent universal fear of castration. This results in a woman’s vagina becoming an object of fear and horror, which “normal” men see as an object of desire. But for some men, being able to see the vagina as such is impossible and in an effort to overcome this, the male psyche has to find some kind of substitute, which Freud suggests is fetishism. I am certain feminists have criticized this theory because of the way Freud implies that the female body is the one that is lacking, but I don’t feel that it is really all that surprising considering that Freud wrote this in the 1920s when gender roles were totally different.

“In the Interpretation of Dreams” by Sigmund Freud he makes an important contrast between the conscious and the unconscious mind. According to Freud, our dreams play a major role in understanding the root of our problems that we can’t face when we are awake. The manifest content also known as dream content is the actual events that occur in a dream. The latent content also known as dream thoughts is the hidden but genuine meaning of a dream. Freud believed that the subconscious can suppress the latent content as a way to protect us from the true meanings of the dreams. This happens because the dream content may be hard for some people to come to terms with. Freud believed that if he could reveal or get to the latent content of someone’s personal conflict, then he could diagnose the problem and fix their conflict. I find myself having dreams thoughts more than dream content. So maybe I might have something lingering in my subconscious that I might not be able to deal with. In class a student brought up a great point – What would Freud consider a person that doesn’t have dreams? But you (the professor) quickly pointed out that Freud doesn’t exactly address this in the piece that we were reading. I was a bit disappointed because it would be interesting to see Freud’s opinion on this. When reading the piece by Freud that was a question that quickly popped up in my mind because I think we all have experienced nights where we just don’t have dreams at all. So, Freud opinions on this will remain in oblivion.

Freud goes on to explain condensation, displacement, and the means of representation. Condensation is when a dream elements all combine into one. Displacement is the game of replacing one thing for another. The means of representation in dreams is the transformation of thoughts into images. Condensation and displacement seems to overlap in the text. Displacement can be seen more as complete while condensation seems almost more of as a contingency. Correct me if I’m wrong.

According to Freud, our childhood experiences also play a significant part in our unconscious mind. Freud points out that the children that don’t develop normally display “on a magnified scale feelings of love and hatred to their parents which occur less obviously and less intensely in the minds of most children (814).” Parents are very influential in a child’s development. The relationship with the parents is the first relationship that the child encounters so it is quite understandable that the parents play such a significant role on how the child develops. An example can be a child that has racist parents. The child wasn’t born with racist tendencies and prejudices but, that behavior was instilled in the child. The relationship will cause the child to trust the parents’ judgements and in turn damaging the child’s state of mind. Freud uses the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles as an example.  For Freud, the play Oedipus Rex can be seen as the manifest content of a dream that both hides and exposes the latent Oedipus complex. Let’s introduce Nietzsche to the party. This also can relate to our study of Nietzsche when he said that humans don’t know anything about themselves. So, if grown adults don’t know anything about ourselves what are our children supposed to know? We learn whats right and wrong from our parents so we act according to that.

Now, let’s introduce Françoise Meltzer to the party. At first when I saw Meltzer on the syllabus I thought that I was going to be reading another piece by a man. When I figured out that it was a woman I was instantly like yeah, girl power. So how about it professor, let’s get some more ladies on the syllabus. Reading Meltzer’s essay can help you understand Freud in more as well. In Meltzer’s “Unconscious” she starts her essay by differentiating between “The Unconscious” and the fact of being unconscious. Meltzer points out that many people argue that the term “unconscious” can only be used as an adjective. Unconscious is not a thing or place but an activity of which we are largely not aware of. Unconscious activity is hard to determine because it is interpreted from events in life which do not require consciousness. For example dreams, slips of the tongue, and puns. Unconscious activity must be inferred from that which is observable, and described and understood from within the realm and rules of “consciousness.” So before you venture into unconsciousness you have to describe what exactly consciousness is and go from there. The unknown is forever doomed to being described in terms of the known. Because of this Freud has to describe the unconscious through analogies, metaphors, similes, etymological play, and anecdotes.

Meltzer finishes by suggesting the unconscious is the way we imagine the unknown and its concealed components. When we talk about the unconscious, we confess more about the human will to search and describe that which is unknowable, hoping that the way we contemplate about the unknown will reveal to us about the patterns of the psyche.

The two primary interpreting lenses established by Freud and Lacan, imply a resolution upon the puzzle of the ego. Freud invests in the singular deconstruction of the object-object relations within the subplot, or latent-content (p.818), of the patient’s manifest content of the dream; while Lacan focuses on the subsequent relation dynamics from subplot to subplot (Unconscious p.160). The connotative value of a singular subplot, according to Freud, upon subsequent stories, is obscured, or censored (p.820), by the endopsychic defenses, by acts of displacement. On the other hand, Lacan views these acts of displacement, not as a hindrance, but a hint into what has changed from the patient’s subsequent dream stories (Unconscious p.160). Who is right in their psychoanalytical approach? Can we find resolution when we’ve solved the puzzle, or rebus, as Freud would say?

Before we go further, allow me to preface the similar nature of ego and id. So, clinically and in literature, psychotherapeutic theories certainly matters, in the same sense as deconstruction (deMan p.1375) has, when concluding that most “great” fictional written stories, are unstable, which is not a put down, but a gesture of it’s virtuosity. In other words, it appears that the ego and id, Hegelian-speaking, is the master to the id’s slave and vice-versa (Unconscious p.157), ultimately arriving to the truth: that the self, is objectively unstable, metaphorically & metonymically (Unconscious p.160).

At best, in a clinical sense, regarding neurosis (p.844), for instance, the patient, through a “successful” therapeutic session, may realize his egocentric habits, which again is unstable to begin with, and can begin to e/sy-mpathize with external surroundings: thus engaging in an anxious-free play with the environment, never feeling subsumed with himself, as is Hamlet (p.817) Apollonian (Nietzsche p.774) over-intellectualizing, via moralizing, to the point of yielding, against murderous intent.

But whose to say the anxious-free environment isn’t unstable itself? So then, it’s fair to claim that neurosis objectively has no moral basis of right or wrong. Certainly, psychoanalytical assessments are relative to a societal norm (knowing or unknowingly) exercised by a majority within that society. Therefore, neurosis is only viewed in bad light, because the majority isn’t neurotic; or rather that it ranges closer to “a glance at the mirror”, than “accidentally leaning too far into the pond”.

So then, the universal therapeutic purpose, is about, I presume, how can we all get along in society? Of course, it depends on the patient’s tolerance of their day-to-day mental activity, which motivates their psychotherapeutic visit. But who’s to say: that initial cause for a visit, isn’t the only known problem, or perhaps the most pertinent. I do believe, that the assumption of a resolution is overall beneficial, and could cast a wider net upon hidden problems in the id, than the initial cause of the visitation.

How does a therapist discover these pertinent problems? Freud explains that the id reveals itself thru gaps (Unconscious p.149) like a Freudian slip-of-the-tongue, memory lapse, etc. through the fallible nature of casual conversation—if the therapist creates a safe ambience in the room. And whether the id is ready to aquatically leak thru a repressive “dam” (p.151), or is in dire need of filling an ego Lacanian lack or psychological desire (p.157), something should reveal itself, thru revealing more than intended. And concluding, strategically, if there can be equal attention on the latent dream & the dynamics of it’s fragmented compositional relationships, in synthesizing the two psychoanalytical approaches of Freud and Lacan, then I believe a therapist can get closer to resolving the mental ailments, that the patient asked to be resolved and possibly more. We can worry about universal purposes for another time.

Damaris Dedes

ENG 306

J. Allred

Blog Post

What’s your Fetish?

Sigmund Freud is known for his psychoanalytical discipline which he often uses to base his other theories. Freud’s Fetishism explains the origin of sexual fetishes. According to Freud sexual fetishes emerge when a young man realizes that his mother does not share the same genitalia as him, the penis. This difference as explained by Freud implants the fear of castration. After a man realizes his mother and him do not share that aspect a “fetish” is then created as a substitute for the penis. Sigmund Fred stated, “When I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, I shall certainly create disappointment…but for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost”, in this portion of the article he is alluding to the fact that some sort of trauma in a young man’s life led to the fetish. He also brings up two important concepts that go hand in hand. The first when a man decides to ‘disavow’ their fear. The fetishist’s need to ‘disavow’ the fear while embracing the fetish. The man renarrates the trauma within the fetish. The second concept was ‘Scotomization’ which in terms means that the perception of the traumatizing memory is completely obliterated. This process is necessary when a man believes that his mother is in danger of not having a penis. In this case the man substitutes things like the shine of a woman’s nose to make up for the lack of penis. After Scotomization has occurred the man believes that the woman has got a penis. Freud states, “We can now see what the fetish achieves and what is it that maintains it. It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and protection against it”, in this portion of the text it is clear that these men have a castration complex which fetishes can cure and also keep them from becoming homosexuals.

Sigmund Freud point is an interesting and quite funny one but it is also fairly sexists to define a woman’s body based on the eyes of a man. It has been noted that Freud believes that women’s genitalia is s form of castration and he dedicated most of his work to avoid going between woman’s legs. Freud does not speak on the woman’s body.

In the text “Unconscious by Francoise Meltzer there was one section that stood out to me more than others. “In other words the irony is that the unconscious can only be described in, understood in, the realm and the rules of consciousness. “Or to put it another way: the unknowable is forever condemned to being described in terms of the of the known. I found that quote to be very interesting. What I took from that is that although we are aware that there are hidden facets of the human kind.  We are blocked from fully understanding or describing them because our consciousness is limited and can’t go beyond are reach. Many people argue that the term “unconscious” is only be used as an adjective, I don’t think that it is not a thing or place but an activity that we don’t even know about. If we think about it, mental activity is a matter of conscious experience,   Funny enough a lot nineteenth-century German and British people refer to something unconscious, without even saying it! I However another writer, Freud took that term that was popular and made it to be sexual. It’s hard to define the nature of unconscious activity because it must be diagnosed by a doctor from by examples  in life which don’t seem moved by the conscious, such as dreams, slips of the tongue, puns, amnesia, compulsions to repeat, denials, and literature. Meltzer concludes by suggesting the unconscious is the way we imagine the unknowable and its hidden works. When we talk about the unconscious, we show more about the human will to explore and explain the unknown, hoping that the way we think about the unknown will tell us in itself about the structures and patterns of the human soul.