Another Body, Another Fantasy
Ambivalence, Drive, and the Letter in Freud’s “‘A Child is Being Beaten’”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.46.3.03Keywords:
ambivalence, drive, fantasy, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Nassif, Oedipus complex, sexual differenceAbstract
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.
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