photography
theater
literature
and so on. First
there are presentations
like this one
which are less psychoanalytic than it might seem. The notion of fetish
and the word
were not invented by Freud; he took them from language
life
the history of cultures
anthropology. He proposed an interpretation of fetishism. This interpretation
in my opinion
is not fully satisfactory. It is obvious that it applies primarily to the early evolution of the young boy. (Incidentally
psychoanalysts often state that the recorded clini- cal cases of fetishism are for the most part male.) The fear of castration and its further consequence
its fate
are necessarily different
at least partially
in children whose body is similar to the mother’s. The Lacanian notion of the phallus
a symbolic organ distinct from the penis
the real organ
represents a step forward in theory; yet it is still the case that within the description of the human subject that psychoanalysis gives us
the male features are often domi- nant
mixed with (and as) general features. But apart from such distortions or silences
which are linked to a general history
other aspects of Freud’s think- ing
and various easily accessible observations which confirm it
remain fully valid. These include: the analysis of the fetishistic nature of male desire; in both sexes the willing suspension of disbelief’ (to use the well-known Anglo- Saxon notion)
a suspension which is determinant in all representative arts
in everyday life (mostly in order to solve problems by half-solutions)
and in the handling of ordinary fetishes; the fetishistic pleasure of framing-deframing. It is impossible to use a theory
to apply it. That which is so called in- volves
in fact
two aspects more distinct than one might at first believe: the intrinsic degree of perfection of the theory itself
and its power of suggestion
of activation
of enlightenment in another field studied by other researchers. I feel that psychoanalysis has this power in the fields of the humanities and social sciences because it is an acute and profound discovery. It has helped me- the personal coefficient of each researcher always enters into the account
despite the ritual declarations of the impersonality of science – to explore one of the many possible paths through the complex problem of the relationship between cinema and photography. I have
in other words
used the theory of fetishism as a fetish. Psychoanalysis
as Raymond Bellour has often underscored
is contempo- rary in our Western history with the technological arts (such as cinema) and with the reign of the patriarchal
nuclear
bourgeois family. Our period has in- vented neurosis (at least in its current form)
and the remedy for it (it has often been so for all kinds of diseases). It is possible to consider psychoanalysis as the founding myth of our emotional modernity. In his famous study of the Oedipus myth
Livi-Strauss has suggested that the Freudian interpretation of this myth (the central one in psychoanalysis
as everybody knows) could be nothing butThis content downloaded from 130.86.12.250 on Wed
08 Feb 2023 05:34:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
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