Narcissism as mastered visibility: The evil eye and the attack of the disembodied gaze

Abstract

The gaze is originally experienced as a disembodied force. This experience is discussed here from a psychopathological prospective and from a developmental perspective. In certain states of regression, when the boundaries between the self and the others are fading away, the gaze is again experienced as a disembodied force that radiates from the eyes and can dangerously penetrate into the mind. The body and its extensions are usually used as a shelter. The body performs this sheltering function in a natural and silent way, and only when this function is lacking do we become aware of it. Shame then signals the failure of the ordinary sheltering function performed by the body. If the external body is not sufficiently cathected, its sheltering function is also decreased, to the point that the body is experienced as transparent, and the most intimate feelings and thoughts become dangerously available to others. In primitive societies, this situation is reflected in the universal belief in the “evil eye,” the most common defense against the evil eye having been a representation of an erect penis. In ancient Rome, the phallus-shaped amulet used to ward off the evil eye was called the “fascinum”: this magic phallus was supposed to neutralize the attack by fascinating the disembodied gaze, that is, by binding it (from the latin verb fascio, fasciare, to bind). The construction of mastered visibility is an organizer of the ego structure. The fascination of the mythical Narcissus for his own mirror image illustrates a central moment of the dialectical construction of the self: the effort to bind the disembodied gaze that is threatening the self, by giving a body to it and by fixing it to an image. Narcissism is thus the effort to bind an almighty free-floating gaze.

Keywords:

• gaze
• eye
• fascination
• phallus
• exhibitionism
• narcissism
• mirroring
• mirror stage
• specular image

Notes

¹Paper presented at the panel on Narcissism and the Primacy of the Image, XVth Forum, Santiago, Chile, October 16, 2008.

²As pointed out by Lewis Kirshner [1991, p. 175], Lacan's early formulation of the narcissistic origins of the ego is solipsistic and misses “the Hegelian resonance of Winnicott's mirror phase, which builds on the principle of intersubjective recognition.” Whereas the subject is seen by Lacan as being trapped in its isolation, Merleau-Ponty reverses the sense of Lacan's analysis.

³“There is no distinction between the data of what the learned adult calls introceptivity and the data of sight”; (Merleau-Ponty, 1949/1964, p. 133).

⁴Merleau-Ponty (1949/1964, p. 129) points out that many pathological facts (which occur in dreams, in dying people, in certain hypnotic states, and in drowning people) bear witness to this kind of external perception of the self, this “autoscopy.” “What reappears in these pathological states, and in drowning people, is comparable to the child's original consciousness of his own visible body in the mirror. ‘Primitive’ people are capable of believing that the same person is in several places at the same time. This possibility of ubiquity, difficult for us to understand, can be illuminated by the initial forms of the specular image.”