Date: Fri, 08 May 1998 04:49:45 +1000
From: Ken Mogg <muffin-AT-labyrinth.net.au>
Subject: Re: Lacan's castrating theory .../ The Phallus and the misuse of Lacan


Hi Daniel McGrady -

I appreciated your last, and admired much of it!

Daniel McGrady wrote (first quoting me):

[snip]

> >My only query about that explanation is: it's so clear, why bring Lacan
> >in at all?
> 
> Very revealing Ken.  It supposes you can't make Lacan lucid.

Well, it was only 'meant' to suppose that, 9 times out of 10, the deeper
theory isn't needed to explicate the film.  (I make possible exceptions
for films like DAMAGE and MONSIEUR HIRE ...)

> It is not impossible to put some of it in plain language.  But this leaves
> open another difficulty.  When something is put in plain English it leaves
> just as much room for misunderstanding.   You seem to have misunderstood
> what I was saying about the Father-figure.

'Just as much'?  Someone told me about 11 Lacanians who each understood
'the mirror-phase' differently!  Anyway, I don't believe that I
misunderstood 'about the Father-figure'.  Read on!
 
> > Why not just say that a woman's desire for father-figures
> >can never be fulfilled, since none can measure up, none can meet her
> >father-ideal?
> 
> The figure is not a father-ideal.

It was a term I used for (my lazy, selfish) convenience.  Apologies. 
I've already owned up, in a previous post, to often being a sloppy
writer.  A better term, clearly, than 'father-ideal' might have been
'father-desired'.

> The point was that it was more like a
> mathematical function.  It is like Fx.  Anything you can substitute for x
> becomes a father figure.   Thus you could have Fa where a is a particular.
>  And thus there can be an infinity of substitutions.

[snip]

> In terms of the logic of the desire for a father
> figure, an endless supply of them would not satisfy.   But the individual
> themselves simply could not cope.   But if they could they could have a new
> father figure subsitute every night.

Round about here, I'm happy to note an approximate correspondence to
Schopenhauer's notion of an indestructible, endlessly and blindly
striving 'Will' ...
 
> > Are there (fiction) films which actually require a
> >knowledge of Lacanian structures to be integrally understood?
> 
> Loads.   E.g. the film 'Damage' (Louis Malle, 1992].

Yes.  Again my sloppy thinking and writing shows.  I should have
specified - as closer to what I was getting at - films made before Lacan
appeared on the scene.

[snip]

> The French films lend
> themselves more easily.  E.g.' Monsieur Hire' [Patrice Leconte, 1989] e.g. is a complex analysis of
> the social gaze.

Would Simenon's novel have needed Lacan for a full explication?, I'm
wondering.

> But it becomes obnoxious when some learn a few Lacanian
> words, like 'the male gaze' and like the girls in the Crucible point it out
> everywhere chanting 'the male gaze, the male gaze ... ' ad nauseam.   Like
> looking for demons under every pew.

Not only that, but overlooking, often enough, subtleties in the actual
(filmic) text.  An example is how a couple of feminist readings of the
boathouse scene in Hitchcock's REBECCA, as printed in David Bordwell's
'Making Meaning' (1989), both miss seeing that Maxim (whose notorious
temper the film establishes) may very well be describing how he murdered
his wife.  That is, both critics take his (second wife's) term 'an
accident' as the plain truth.

> >Robert Samuels's 'Hitchcock's Bi-textuality' (1998),
> >which also takes a Lacanian approach ...
> 
> Have you got an ISBN number for that?

Reading it from the page, it's 'ISBN 0-7914-3609-8 (alk. paper). - ISBN
0-7914-3610-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)
 
> > >'At all events, the phallus of this dream seems to be a subterranean God
> > >"not to be named," and such it remained throughout my youth, reappearing
> > >whenever anyone spoke too emphatically about Lord Jesus.' (Carl Jung,
> 'Memories,
> > >Dreams, Reflections', Chapter 1)
> 
> Well, let us say that the phallus for Jung 'really' was the penis.

Why?  Jung calls it a 'ritual phallus' but also says that he doesn't
know how the image came to him in in his dream at age 3-4.

[snip]

> While he was
> denying Freud's sexual underpinning of Psychoanalysis, he was having
> affairs with his patients.   Where Freud realized this was part of the
> structure of the phantasy to be analysed, Jung was taking it for real and
> becoming involved.    He had more to fear from his own penis than Freud did
> his.  Whereas Freud saw the symbolic value of the penis, and thus having
> divine properties, Jung took the penis at its biological level and got
> stuck in.

I neither see the relevance of this to the boy Jung's dream nor do I
find it anything but a cheap distortion of the rich understanding
arguably beyond Freud's ken that Jung brought to the psychoanalytic
encounter.  (As for 'biology', it exists, and in more than just the
head.  If you weren't so committed to 'theory', dear Daniel, would you
still denigrate 'biology' as you do?!)

> I have always found Jung's dream analyses simplistic, and extremely homely.
>   They are so Swiss.   [...]  Then we remember what Orson Welles quips in
> 'The Third Man' about the Swiss and the Cuckoo clock.

Welles was overlooking Jung!   And what's so wrong with 'homeliness'? 
(Actually, Jung may have been MORE cosmopolitan than Freud.)  Also, I
happen to believe that there's a wisdom that is 'invisible', that is
'timeless', that maybe by-passes language, certainly written language,
altogether.

At the risk of an irrelevance (because not really analogous to the Swiss
experience), consider ...   There are communities such as those of the
Hutterians in the US and Canada 'whose very low incidence of mental
ill-health, and the absence of social pathology among them, have
attracted the attention of psychiatrists and sociologists.  Crime,
suicide, drug addiction, homosexuality, illegitimacy, alcoholism and
divorce are virtually unknown ... and as far as such judgements are
possible, it appears that the Hutterians are more contented and happier
than most of their fellow men.'  (Bryan Wilson, c. 1970)

> >Something that might appeal to you, Daniel, with your interest in
> >etymology, is this fragment of Jung's musing:
> 
> >'... I do not know where the anatomically correct phallus can have come
> >from.  The interpretation of the orificium urethrae as an eye, with the
> >source of light apparently above it, points to the etymology of the word
> >phallus ([Greek word], shining, bright).'
> 
> Where is that from Ken?

>From the passage describing Jung's boyhood dream in 'Memories, Dreams,
Reflections'.

> The word 'phallus' (it is really 'phallos') has
> its stem in 'phao' which means to shine.   There was a god Phales
> associated with Bacchic rites.   Jung is thinking of the word 'phalos'
> which means 'shining, white'.   It is used of the white on the crest of the
> waves which symbolized Aphrodite arising out of Ocean's semen.

That last detail is interesting, because I keep seeing the ocean as a
symbol of 'Will'. I often think of how it's described in Lewis Allen's
THE UNINIVITED (1944), as 'a place of life and death and eternity too'.

> >'Through this childhood dream I was initiated into the secrets of the
> >earth. ...  My intellectual life had its unconscious beginnings at that
> >time.'
> 
> Is he talking about masturbation?

Huh?!

No! Actually, his mother's voice is heard in the dream saying, 'That is
the man-eater!' Jung's explication links the dream to his distrust
thereafter of spurious (?) authority-figures - which is not something
that is conspicuous in Freud, is it?  Only after 50 years, Jung notes,
from reading something about the motif of cannibalism that underlies the
Mass, 'did it become clear to me how exceedingly unchildlike, how
sophisticated and oversophisticated was the thought that had begun to
break through into consciousness' [so long ago, when he dreamt of an
underground 'ritual phallus'].
 
> >(I see that 'the earth' might, ultimately, imply biology, but Jung's
> >insights are of an order that is apart from that.)
> 
> Earth is not biology.

I was trying to find a way of agreeing with you that Jung's dream was
somehow 'biological'!  I was thinking that earth is where things grow
...

> If you are interested in starting up a discussion on any of those papers in
> Zizek's Lacan on Hitchcock I will join you on that one.

I assume that you mean Zizek's 'Everything You Always Wanted to Know
About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)'?  Truly you've caught me
at a bad time, but I well recall thinking that Frederic Jameson's piece
therein on NORTH BY NORTHWEST constructed a vast theoretical edifice in
order to deliver ... a modicum of insight!

- Ken Mogg.


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