Perversion by Swales Stephanie S

Author:Swales, Stephanie S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

The Gaze and Shame: Exhibitionism, Voyeurism, and Fetishism

You grasp here the ambiguity of what is at issue when we speak of the scopic drive. The gaze is this object lost and suddenly refound in the conflagration of shame, by the introduction of the other.

Lacan (1973/1998a, p. 182)

The gaze I encounter is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze I imagine in the field of the Other.

Lacan (1973/1998a, p. 84)

The gaze is intimately related to the affect of shame. As previously stated, the primary drive for the exhibitionist, the voyeur, and the fetishist is the scopic drive, and so shame plays a prominent role in these substructures. According to Lacan, the exhibitionist makes the gaze appear in the field of the Other, while the voyeur makes the gaze appear in himself in order to plug up the hole in the Other. Correspondingly, the exhibitionist's aim is to produce a feeling of shame in the Other, while the voyeur himself experiences shame. Following what Lacan says about fetishism, it is my hypothesis that the fetishist makes the gaze appear “in” the fetish, which means that the gaze appears both in the field of the subject and in the field of the Other.

It is notable that the gaze and the scopic drive of a pervert differ from those of a neurotic insofar as their ideational representatives have only been affected by primal repression and disavowal rather than by both primal and secondary repression. In effect, what this means is not only that the scopic drive (and the drives in general) of a pervert is “stronger” than that of a neurotic but also that the lawgiving Other has had little, if any, impact on his scopic drive. When considering the function of the scopic drive as it functions in perversion, then, we must take into account the kind of Other under whose influence the scopic drive was re-written.

First, the scopic drive is related to a primordial Other, to an Other prior to the one who judges. The primordial Other does not judge but “only sees or [allows to] be seen” (Miller, 2006d, p. 13). Shame is a primary affect in relation to the primordial Other. Within the realm of the scopic drive, nudity and the sight of genitalia are the first provocations of shame. Correspondingly, the importance in perversion of the image of the boy's penis has to do with the modesty and shame of both the boy and his mOther.

In contrast, “guilt is the effect on the subject of an Other that judges, thus of an Other that contains the values that the subject has supposedly transgressed … guilt is [therefore] related to desire” (Miller, 2006d, p. 13). Because perverts, in comparison with neurotics, have less desire and were much less impacted by the lawgiving Other, it follows that perverts also have much less capacity for guilt. The importance of this fact should be emphasized because the current one-size-fits-all treatment for sexual offenders depends upon the success of methods that aim to appeal to and increase their feelings of guilt.

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