The Scopophilic Garden from Monet to Mirbeau in His Attempt
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.
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