This was originally written on 4/6/2021.
I’ve written about the gaze elsewhere, but never in terms of my own analysis. It has come up there recently, so I’d like to write about it now.
The first thing you need to know about the gaze, if you don’t know much about it, is what an important role it plays in obsession — the structure I’m pretty certain I fit under (if we think about my own case structurally). I am quite preoccupied with the thought that I’m being watched and judged; a key component of obsessional neurosis. Of course, the gaze is an object (check out Lacan’s seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis for a full discussion, and this page on NoSubject for a brief one), which means that it doesn’t function solely by the act of other people actually looking at a subject. I’m getting a little ahead of myself though. Let’s go through the session I’m thinking of.
I told my analyst about a dream I had. It was about him, actually, which was already odd because I’ve never had a dream featuring my analyst before. Anyway, here’s the dream:
I said something to my analyst. He replies, “So why not let people in a little more?” to which I fire back, “Once you let someone in then they expect things from you.”
That’s it. A really short one. He asked a few questions about what was meant by this conversation and I told him this, essentially: I very easily place people in the role of Other, and once I do that I tend to capitulate to whatever they want to keep the Other off my back. The more people get to “know me,” the more easily I can cast them in this role of Other, and thus the more easily I feel compelled to capitulate to them, which creates a host of problems. For instance, two close friends who I’ve turned into Other will want different things that sometimes clash. I can’t fulfill both, so one has to be disappointed. What’s the result of this? It is anxiety. Since the word “anxiety” can mean a host of various things, lets instead use the word “anguish.” When I disappoint the Other I feel anguished. The question turns into “why?”
From there my analyst hypothesized that perhaps it’s the idea of losing the gaze — that is, no longer being a gazed upon subject. (If you’re curious, he pulled this from chapter 17 of Lacan’s seminar X, Anxiety.) I disagreed, however, and posed a new element to this constellation.
His hypothesis rested on the idea that I don’t desire for the gaze to go away. My counterargument was that my fear (if one can call it that) of the gaze is not that I won’t be an object of the gaze anymore, but that people will “point and laugh at what a fucking idiot I am.” I gave an example: I hate dancing, I hate it deeply. But, since dancing is a big part of a wedding, I decided to try practicing so that I wouldn’t make a fool out of myself. What I found, though, was that even completely alone in my house with the blinds drawn and no possibility of being seen and ridiculed, I couldn’t build up the courage to dance on my own. So my alternate hypothesis was this: what if my own unconscious is so Other that I don’t need any other person to really fill that role? What if my unconscious can gaze upon me as a subject instead? It would explain my extreme anguish even without any possibility whatsoever of being seen.
I’ve skipped over something important from earlier sessions which I’ll note here: a huge part of my analysis during the first several months was that my unconscious would speak and I would fail to hear or listen. There would be obvious slips, parapraxes, bungled actions, dream interpretations, and so on, that I would completely miss because I simply wasn’t listening. I’ve condensed a lot here. This took place over the much better part of the first year of my analysis.
And here is where things really happen.
My analyst said back to me something like this: “So the first hypothesis can’t be as wrong as all that. You are the object of your unconscious’ gaze. No one else need be around, no Other need be present except that you’ve built one, because you’re gazing at yourself.”
And I responded: “If I gaze at myself then I don’t have to face up to the idea that nobody really gives a shit.”
End of session.