This article talks about the relation between the primal mirror experience and the establishment of self/other limits. A discussion of a clinical case will enable us to appreciate the importance of the other’s gaze as a necessary precondition for the deployment of the process of subjectivation and the construction of a double limit: inside-outside and unconscious-preconscious-conscious.
Adolescence, 2020, 38, 1, 135-138.
The authors study the function of the gaze and its clinical issues in the adolescent’s confrontation with the Real of the sexual by means of two clinical cases in which the gaze crystalizes trauma after the confession of a sexual transgression to the Other.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 1, 199-208.
In his book Marilyn, Last Sessions, M. Schneider recounts what happened in the course of thirty months of the last sessions of Marilyn Monroe’s slice of analysis with Ralph Greenson and shows the passionate aspect of this relationship. An explication of the actress’s exhibitionist problematic would have certainly led to a deeper understanding of the issues of this analysis. The author explains the elements of clinical work on exhibitionism, particularly in the woman, in order to show that these elements are quite present here, and they shed much light on how things evolved in this case.
Only for the past half century or so have philosophy and the human sciences considered the gaze in itself and studied its presence and action in current life and in history. Using recent research by historians of mentalities, the author follows step by step the way in which this emergence occurs, in order to highlight the specific character of the corresponding Freudian notion.
Afterwards he imagines how psychoanalysis has gradually come to locate the gaze among the objects that govern our unconscious life. Sometimes confused with the sex, the instance of the superego or guardian, or with a partial object, it should rather be defined as a herald of the enigmatic message, condensing the sexual core of the message and impelling the subject to embody it in one way or another.
The session and its continuum in everyday life must of course be considered as a third-party relation; in it, « two people looking at each other » are brought together and compromised under the same «other» gaze ; a group is formed, trust (and illusion) shared… The lighthouse, initially unknown (a stranger), inspires exchanges that are more and more familiar: talking replaces being looked at. Thanks to this third-party construction, the interactions that define the site can henceforth be interpreted or « reconstructed ».
In institutional clinical treatment, blind adolescents are often heard to complain of not being seen. Emerging from invisibility presupposes facing the Other’s gaze, which is essential to specular validation and to the question of lack and of loss induced by sensorial deprivation.
When looking each other in the eye, human beings change radically their mode of communication: through this shared gaze, they seek out the other’s intent and consequently open up the space of the imaginary and of fantasy where vision in the animal world remains a search for clues: this is the argument of the book Eye to Eye, and the essential of this reply to Gérard Bonnet.
The author analyzes several articles and books devoted to the central role of the gaze in human relations for some time. He points out the principle teachings and regrets the lack of cooperation and exchange which characterize these, when they concern a particularly burning subject. This is doubtless due to the fact J. Lacan’s contributions about the distinction between the eye and the gaze are not sufficiently taken into account.
Homer favors two kinds of hero : the hero like Achilles in the Iliad, who glorifies mortal combat and has had many imitators throughout history, and the kind embodied by Ulysses in the Odyssey, in which the hero proves himself by thwarting the obstacles he meets on his way back to his place of origin. On the one hand, we have a struggle between two which, though it certainly brings notoriety, causes the destruction of one of the two parties involved ; on the other hand, we have the hero’s ceaseless combat to save his life and find his place in the city. The first gives precedence to the gaze and is submitted to the requirements of appearances ; the second, on the contrary, first goes after the eye which holds sway over him and takes it apart in order to give himself a name. The adolescent process takes part in theses two discourses at the same time, and presupposes a gradual disengagement from the mastery of sight which reflects back the ideal. Referring to different literary works, the author shows the conditions that make possible this evolution.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 313-326.