Filozofski vestnik

Fantasy in “A Child is Being Beaten”

Jacques Nassif; Holden M. Rasmussen — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

This article is a translation of Jacques Nassif’s 1967 reading of Sigmund Freud’s “‘A Child is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions.” The text appeared in Cahiers pour l’Analyse, a Paris-based, student-led journal that published articles related to psychoanalysis and epistemology. This article offers a rereading of Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten,” shifting the focus from perversion to the role of fantasy, as if the elaboration of fantasy were Freud’s manifest project. Nassif’s reading yields insight into the centrality of castration and castration fantasies to the overall structure of fantasy and subjectivity. Furthermore, he proposes that his reading offers an “archaeology of the subject” as opposed to a case-historical or model-based theory of the subject. The full elaboration of this methodological approach is left open. This text remains an underexplored resource for researchers in the psychoanalytic field and contributes significantly to ongoing inquiries into the interplay between sexual difference, science, fantasy, and subjectivity.

Freud and Science

Jacques Nassif; Holden M. Rasmussen — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

This article is a translation of Jacques Nassif’s 1968 article “Freud et la science,” which appeared in Cahiers pour l’Analyse. Nassif assesses the compatibility of the psychoanalytic theory of repetition with the concept of the epistemological break. If epistemological breaks are ruptures with the past, then how does that apply in the case of psychoanalysis as both a general science and a clinical practice? As Nassif notes, the concept of repetition is fundamental to both registers of psychoanalysis: as a behavior outside the clinic and as an instrumental phenomenon within the clinic. Given the fundamentality of repetition, what is the status of the break in the field and function of psychoanalysis? Nassif’s answer is that psychoanalysis breaks with the past by virtue of a repetition of a previous series of breaks in the psychological sciences. This series of breaks appears across the works of Jean-Martin Charcot, John Hughlings Jackson, Hippolyte Bernheim, and Josef Breuer. After a close-reading of Freud’s engagement with Charcot’s work, an examination of his tutelage under Charcot, and an assessment of the novelty of Charcot’s methods and theories, Nassif suggests that epistemological breaks imply a subsequent “repetition of the break” [répétition de coupure]. However, how Freud makes his own inaugural break through the repetition of a previous series of breaks remains to be elucidated. Nassif’s article thus attempts to “repeat” the origins of psychoanalysis, and to shed light on the applicability of the notion of the epistemological break in contested “sciences,” like Marxism and psychoanalysis. The article ends with a note that a sequel is to follow. Nassif later incorporated the material from this article into his major 1977 book Freud, l’inconscient.

Another Body, Another Fantasy

Holden M. Rasmussen — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

In a 1967 article for Cahiers pour l’Analyse, Jacques Nassif shifts the focus of Freud’s “‘A Child is Being Beaten’” from the aetiology of perversions to the question of fantasy. Nassif concludes that there is a fundamental fantasy exhibited in these cases and conducts an “archaeology” of this fundamental fantasy, locating the origin of fantasy with the origin of sexual difference: castration and the Oedipus complex. In the final lines of the article, Nassif wonders if “another fantasy,” with a different verbalization that corresponds to a “another body,” could be built on this structure, but admits his reading does not permit an answer to this question. I propose that a reading that shifts the focus in the text again provides both an affirmative answer to Nassif’s question as well as indications of an elaboration. On my reading, without abandoning Nassif, ambivalence is the conceptual focus. Ambivalence, as Freud formulates it, is not just the reversal of feelings into their opposite, like love transformed into hate. Rather, ambivalence is the co-presence of things “different in their nature,” and this co-presence modifies these things chained together. In the context of the fantasy in “‘A Child is Being Beaten,’” this shift in conceptual focus results in an alternative schema of the Oedipus complex, an analysis of drive as a linguistic representation of the ambivalent relation, and the Lacanian concept of the letter as the precipitate of this ambivalent relation circuited by the drive. The conclusion, here, is that the fantasies recorded in the text do not only express a fundamental fantasy about the origin of the sexes, as Nassif suggests, but express a fundamental fantasy about the conditions of signification tout court. The article ends on an open question—cued by Nassif’s closing question in his essay—regarding the possibility of further reconciliation between queer theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis in light of this analysis of ambivalence, drive, and the letter.

Construction in Traversing the Fantasy

Alenka Zupančič — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Jacques Nassif’s commentary on Freud’s analysis of the fustigation fantasy (“A child is being beaten”) offers several incisive points of entry into Freud’s conceptualization of fantasy and its relation to other central notions of psychoanalysis. This text examines its connection to the drives, as well as the distinction between the structural, the individual, and the singular in fantasy formation, emphasizing Freud’s notion of “construction in analysis” as pivotal. It highlights the difference between the “fundamental fantasy” and the so-called “original fantasies,” and proposes an articulation of the relation between drives and fantasy grounded in the concept of primal repression (Urverdrängung).

The Choice of Neurosis

Tadej Troha — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The article approaches Freud’s concept of the choice of neurosis (Neurosenwahl) through Jacques Nassif’s 1968 essay “Freud and Science.” In this text, Nassif focuses on the ways in which Jean-Martin Charcot influenced the development of Freud’s thought, highlighting in particular Charcot’s decisive gesture of isolating neurosis as a purely psychological affection. The article accordingly proceeds from the hypothesis that the repetition of the break—which Nassif identifies as the central methodological gesture of psychoanalysis— takes place here in the form of a repetition and radicalization of Charcot’s “choice of neurosis.” In other words, the problem of the choice of neurosis could be posed only on the basis of Charcot’s prior gesture, and if Freud wished to remain faithful to this gesture, he had to articulate the choice of neurosis as a speculative, metapsychological concept. The article shows that the choice of neurosis functions as a nodal point between empiricism, psychoanalytic technique, and metapsychological speculation, and, on another level, between ontogenetic and phylogenetic approaches: a constellation that becomes particularly clear in the analysis of the initially lost and later rediscovered twelfth and final metapsychological essay, “Overview of the Transference Neuroses.”

Still Life; or, the Return to Things—What Things?

Bertrand Prévost — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Here we seek to respond to the renewed interest that still life enjoys today: to draw out its symptomatic value, which would make still life the point of determination, within art history’s discourse, of the broader return to things now unfolding across diverse fields—from philosophy to anthropology. To return to things would thus mean to return to the object. Yet it is precisely by refusing to let the concept of the thing collapse into the indeterminacy of an object that still life may be reimagined anew—once we attend to its profoundly domestic dimension, where “house” signifies less a building than possession, one’s own place, one’s domain, one’s home. In this way, still life is restored to its appropriative vocation, against the descriptive logics that so often provide its theoretical frame. It is a way of displacing the discourse of objectification and the discourses of “scientific observation” in favour of another, far more ancient perspective: that of domestic economy. Conceived as the regulation of one’s own goods, the ordering of the things of the household, domestic economy would then offer, in a sense, the theoretical formula for what seems to take place in the anthropological depths of still life: a pictorial art of tidying, arranging, disposing—an entire art of the home.

Changing Stillness

Anna Montebugnoli — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

This essay examines the distinctive knot of ontology and rhetoric woven by sixteenthand seventeenth-century still life. Framed against a Foucauldian analysis of the Âge classique and its epistemic order, it seeks to illuminate the subtle shifts this minor genre introduced into the culture from which it emerged. The central argument is that, through its pictorial features—meticulous naturalism, the absence of a thematic centre, and indifference to the historia—still life made visible the onto-linguistic fabric that structured the classification of beings in its time. Moreover, these very features endowed the genre with a peculiar capacity to shift both the place and the “essence” of the things depicted. In doing so, still life stages a singular form of change that unfolds within the immobility of its representation.

Still Life in Movement

Rebeka Vidrih — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

By the juxtaposition or the intertwinement of the two arguably seminal texts on still life, Charles Sterling’s comprehensive art historical study and Gérard Wajcman’s theoretical, philosophical commentary thereon, the interpretative net is firmly established; the impression is given that all that is left is the reiteration of the well-trodden paths. However, neither the historical presentation of still life’s linear emancipation from historia nor the following ontological definition of the emancipated still life is so simple. Still life as a specific iconographic genre is shown to be, contrary to its name, in a perpetual state of becoming, of movement. And more, as soon as the goal of emancipation from the historical painting is achieved, the movement becomes inverted: a renewed relationship between still life and historia follows on another level. On the other hand, it is shown that still life is only rarely completely devoid of some narrative content.

Death in the Image

Magdalena Germek — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

This article examines death in visual art as a process that exceeds mere representation; death is not treated as a passive theme but as an active structure that produces knowledge about violence, history, and collective relations. The analysis focuses on three distinct visual regimes in early modern European art. In Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death, death appears as a mechanized system, where the serial repetition of skeletons and the absence of transcendence generate a sense of rationalized violence. In the painting The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers, death is depicted as the brutal autopsy of the political body. Vanitas still life presents death as an introspective reminder while simultaneously concealing the material conditions of luxury and its colonial background. In all three cases, the image of death operates as a visual regime that structures vision and as an epistemological apparatus that produces knowledge of historical, political, and economic processes.

“A Great Clash of Figures”

Angèle Tence — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Rubens’ The Fall of the Damned (1619–1621) has been widely acclaimed by critics since the end of the 17th century. However, few studies have focused on its “material effects,” their perception and critical reception. This article starts with the materiality of the damned body falling in hell, before exploring more theoretical and aesthetic aspects. The notion of grand fracas de figures (“great clash of figures”), inherited from Roger de Piles, marks the introduction into historiography of a vision of colour as constructing pictorial forms. Rubens’s brushwork and the fluidity of his material (Focillon) encourage to re-evaluate the stains, coloured masses, and effusions that put precise forms in crisis. The “rain of fire” (duc de Richelieu) and erupting volcano (Antoine Wiertz), compared to the materiality of painting, finally manifest the unexpected richness of matter in commentaries from the 17th to the 19th century.

Afropessimism’s Ethics

Cristopher Chamberlin — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

By analyzing the xenopathic status of the gaze and the voice during the “mental breakdown” described in Frank B. Wilderson III’s latest memoir, this essay reads afropessimism as a formalization of the lived experience of psychosis. It argues that Wilderson’s understanding of antiblackness is significantly modeled on the imaginary mechanisms and ruses that define neurotic reality and confer psychic coherence to the neurotic subjects of liberal multiracialism. Treating psychosis as an immanent critique of antiblackness, this essay concludes by offering a clarification of the stakes of afropessimism’s ethical imperatives: to end the antiblack world (of neurotic misrecognition) and to assume the position of social death (of a desire outside-of-language).

Why the Group is Mad

K. Daniel Cho — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

I examine introjection as it is elaborated by Freud in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” Against Ferenczi, who invented the term to name a neurotic process, Freud theorizes introjection as a psychotic process. Through Freud’s reinterpretation of introjection, I argue that the group, in Freud, is a psychotic formation, which has the structure of melancholia. I conclude by using introjection to shed light on how melancholia turns into mania, a question that Freud left unanswered in his first theorization of melancholia, the paper “Mourning and Melancholia.”

On the Collective Subject

Arka Chattopadhyay — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The article aims to theoretically construct the collective subject from Lacan’s Borromean turn which contains a reflection on knotting, mathematical groups and the Freudian “single trait” translated as “unary trait.” Through his teaching of the One and its relation with the “unary trait,” not to mention the Borromean clinic, I will develop a Lacanian collective subject. From triadic knotting to generalized Borromean, we will see how the One turns to the multiple as more than one cuts become necessary to dissolve the Borromean chain. This shift has implications for the Lacanian collective subject. This subject is non-totalizable and radically democratic with a series of One-multiples, forming the collective. The article then goes on to connect this collective subject with Alain Badiou’s insistence on the inherent collectivity of the political subject and dwells on the resistant and “evental” possibilities of this collectivity. In Badiou’s thought, radical politics is an evental creation of “collective” or “generic humanity.” The collective subject of fidelity in Badiou is theorized at a distance from parliamentary democracy and its delegation-based representational politics. In both Lacan and Badiou, topology plays a key role in collectivizing the logic of the subject. Foregrounding this debt to mathematics, this article thinks through the ways in which the collective subject topologically reconfigures the relationship between the individual and the community by “voiding” the one of the individual with the one-multiple of the commune. The purpose of the article is to show how mathematical thinking supports the psychoanalytic and philosophical thinking of the collective subject as a political concept.