Fantasy in “A Child is Being Beaten”

Abstract

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.