CHAPTER 7 Hysterical Vision: The Scopophilic Garden from Monet to Mirbeau In his attempt to give ocular disorders a psychoanalytical inter­ pretation, Freud cited the tale of Lady Godiva. This "beautiful legend," he wrote, "tells how all the town's inhabitants hid behind their shuttered windows, so as to make easier the lady's task of riding naked through the streets in broad daylight, and how the only man who peeped through the shutters at her revealed loveli­ ness was punished by going blind."1 For Freud, the fate of the renegade voyeur illustrated how scopophilia (the "love of looking") is punished by the ego with blindness or, in the term popularized by his teacher Jean-Martin Charcot, with scotomization (from the Greek skotos, meaning "darkness"; signifying partial, distorted, or peripheral vision within the fieldof ophthalmology). Moving beyond the studies of hysterical vision made by Charcot and Pierre Janet between 1887 and 1889, which merely identified characteristic symptoms such as color blindness, dilated pupils, strabismus, and the twisting of the orb to reveal the whites of the eye, Freud inferred the law of lex talionis (Urteilvenverfung), literally, "retaliation," in the condemnation of a visual representation deemed sexually culpable by the faculty of judgment. This "verdict of guilty," strangely recalling the old wives' tale that masturbation leads to blindness, also evokes as its corollary the equally proverbial notion 1. Sigmund Freud, "The Psycho-Analytic View of Psychogenic Disturbance of Vision" (1910), Standard Edition 11:217. Further references to this essay will be to this edition and will be abbreviated "DY.'' 147 148 Feminizing the Fetish of "turning a blind eye." For Freud, however, these sayings were the folkloric expressions of a malady that was not only individual but also collective. If in the private world of the self the punishments forSchaulust (hunger of the gaze) imposed by the ego assumed the form of hysteria, in the public realm they signaled a crisis of judgment, an imbalance in the careful treaty made by civilization between sexual drives and their institutional sublimation. Charcot's scotome scintillant, characterized as an eblouissement de tenebres (dazzle of shadow) clouding the eyes of his fe male hysterics, became a privileged sign of personal and public psychosis within the early history of psychoanalysis.2 Comparing the scotoma to a "fortification a la Vauban," Charcot made a drawing of this "ophthalmic migraine" as a hatched and broken spiral: "a luminous image, firstcircular, then semicircular, in the formof a zigzag; like the drawing of a fortification flickering in a very rapid, vibrating movement. An image sometimes phosphorescent, sometimes offer­ ing shades of yellow, red or blue of varying densities. That is what we call the scintillating scotoma."3 This scotoma, interfering with the visual field, was associated by Charcot with the first stages of hysteria, the douleur, or irritation of the eye, that commenced the aurahys terica. From Charcot to Rene Laforgue, the scotoma was so matter-of-factly taken by the French psychoanalytical school as the visual sign of repression that it provoked a five-year dispute be­ tween Freud and Laforgue, who insisted, despite Freud's objec­ tions, on translating Ve rdrangung (repression) as "scotomization."4 Lacan, perhaps complicitous with Laforgue in his desire to "re­ Frenchify" denial and disavowal, revived the term scotoma, using it as a metaphor for consciousness.5 Consciousness, as a variant of 2. See Georges Didi-Huberman's discussion of Charcot's drawing of the scotome scintillant and sensation of an eblouissement de tenebres in Invention de l'hysterie (Paris: Macula, 1982), p. 132. 3. Jean-Martin Charcot, "Le\;ons sur les maladies du systeme nerveux," Oeuvres completes, g vols. (Paris: Bureaux du Progres medical, 1885-1890), 3:74, quoted in Didi-Huberman, Invention de l'hysterie, p. 283. 4. The debate between Freud and Laforgue can be found in their correspond­ ence (1923-37), published in French in Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, no. 15 (Spring 1977): 251-314. 5. Jacques Lacan, "A namorphosis," in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho­ analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New Yo rk: Norton, 1978), pp. 82-83. Here Lacan writes of the scotoma: "Psycho-analysis regards the conscious­ ness as irremediably limited, and institutes it as a principle, not only of idealization, but of meconnaissance, as-using a term that takes on new value by being referred to a visible domain-scotoma. The term was introduced into the psycho-analytic vocabu­ lary by the French School. Is it simply a metaphor? We find here once again the Hysterical Vision 149 Sartrean meconnaissance, slides into a model of "seeingness" (voyure), in which the scotoma marks the vanishing point where the eye catches itself offguard in the act of seeing itself see itself: ''.As the locus of the relation between me, the annihilating subject, and that which surrounds me, the gaze seems to possess such a privilege that it goes so far as to have me scotomized. I who look, the eye of him who sees me as object. In so far as I am under the gaze, Sartre writes, I no longer see the eye that looks at me and, if I see the eye, the gaze disappears" (FFC 84). The scotomized Lacanian subject is caught in a contentious struggle for mastery between the eye and the gaze that parallels Charcot's dialectic between scopophilia and scotomization. Both metaphor for and visible evidence of repression, the scotoma, as Lacan uses the term, plays on an ambiguity already introduced by Charcot, where the physical sight of the brilliant aurawas interpreted both as manifestation of, and punishment for, hysteria. Signs of the "essential vacillation of the gaze," Lacan's spots emerge throughout his writings as blind. Stains, punctiforms, sutures, splits, butterflies ("primal stripes ...on the grid of desire") [FFC 76]), or points of irradiation from which "reflections pour forth, overflowing the ocular bowl" (FFC 94), these taches, or spots, are the unmistakable evidence of castrated vision. Within the Lacanian lexicon, male and female viewer alike hystericize the scopic field in an effort to "camouflage" (Lacan's term) the spectacle of phallic lack. Scotomization, the process of visual occlusion that punishes pri­ vate or public voyure-isme, was subtly politicized and institutional­ ized in the overlapping spheres of sexual and national politics at the end of the nineteenth century. As many recent studies have shown, women whose sexual inclinations led them to affront social mores (the example of Camille Claudel is among the most notori­ ous) were commonly chastised with protracted sojourns in a psychi­ atric ward. Once there, they stood a good chance of becoming subjects in an array of casually sadistic experiments that were being performed at the time by Charcot and his disciples. Alfred Binet, forexample, shortly aftercompleting his work on fe tishism, investi­ gated the related problem of hysterical vision-what he called la vision mentale-through a series of tests in which the bodies of his female hysterics were scarified with needles. Jabbing the skin here ambiguity that affects anything that is inscribed in the register of the scopic drive." Further references to this work will be abbreviated FFC. 1 50 Feminizing the Fetish and there to determine the nature and degree of sensation and response, pricking the "hysterically anaesthetized" zones of the anatomy (believed to demarcate lesions severing feeling from intel­ ligence) with "the point of a compass," Binet interpreted the body's translation of pain into dizzying flickers as the cipher of inner perception (Wilhelm Wundt's innerer Blickpunkt or points de fixation interne). Attempting to decode the dense spray of variegated spots (taches) induced by these violent piqures (punctures), he compared (with unnerving detachment) the hysteric's body to a mystic writing pad on which the doctor could transcribe at will. "If we trace a character or letter on the skin, the subject will see this same character or letter on the visual screen," he wrote of this female tracing paper. Prodding more gingerly still, he discovered that "if one presses harder, one obtains dots or spots that become darker, almost black, resembling trails of ink that would leave a stain on paper."6 Despite his efforts to "read" transparently the female body in pain, Binet failed to forge any significant theoretical connections between mental vision, scotomization, and fetishism. His references to Wundt's work on interior visual fixation, however, imply a fetishism no longer concentrated on exterior objects but, rather, congested and turned inward on itself. As if punished forlingering on an object of desire in the outside world, Binet's hysteric scotomizes her inner field of vision, bathing the focused image in a wash of scintillating dots. Though he himself never articulated the plausible bridge between hysterical vision and visual repression, one can discern in Binet's description of this inverted fetishism of the eye a mechanism of retribution not dissimilar to lex talionis. The medical establishment's obliviousness to the mistreatment of women in the course of its investigations of hysterical vision forms a seemingly not so arbitrary counterpart to the scales that descended over the political eyes of a nation at the time of the Dreyfus affair. Here I am referring specifically to the way in which the French public, as if afflicted by hysterical vision (itself the apparent result of a blinding nationalism), refusedto believe the evidence of its own eyes: that the memoranda used to inculpate Dreyfus were obvious forgeries. Looking back on some of the more significant literary 6. Alfred Binet, "La Vision mentale: Recherches sur les alterations de la con­ science chez les hysteriques," Revue Philosophique 27 (Apr. 1889): 347, 351.