1. I was wondering what people thought about the implications of Freud's theory of overvaluation of the sexual object. What does the over-investment of desire towards the sexual object and what Freud calls the "intellectual infatuation" with the object at hand create in terms of the subject's own perception of his relation to the object? Is the appreciations an obscuring? Does overvaluation have to exist at a primary level for people to exist with one another on a continual basis?
2. Freud's mentioning of scopophilia among children (p.58) and his earlier mentioning of sight as subsidiary to touch made me wonder how the relation between possession and viewing in modern media forms can be seen as a sort of pseudo-possession. Does this imply that looking can become a sort of power relation in terms of soothing the subject who cannot actually access the object of desire?
3. I am confused by Freud's claim under the 'The Barrier Against Incest' that states that children's sexual impulses towards their parents "are as a rule already differentiated owing to the attraction of the opposite sex"(p.93) in contrast to his claim later on that inversion is prohibited mostly by " authoritative prohibition by society." It seems as though he waivers as to whether object choice is meaningful or whether it is arbitrary. I guess the question is, can you clear this up for me?
4. The creation of a fetish as a masking of the lack of a penis acts as a means to obscure reality and accept reality at the same time. If this duel process is the case in terms of investing oneself in an object of desire, are all sexual object choices in some ways an acknowledgment of a personal lack on one hand, and a desire to obscure the personal lack, as if by association with the other one becomes it, on the other hand?
- george w.
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3. I usually find myself disagreeing vehemently with Freud, but I do think that scopophilia has a lot to do with how human cope with the inability to posses desired objects. A child may be comforted by his/her mother's presence: seeing the mother is enough for the child to know that it, in some small sense, owns the mother - which, according to Freud, it knows it cannot actually do, since the father possessed the mother first.
I was also thinking about this idea of sight and ownership as they apply to museums: being able to see an object in a public space, even if it is not in your own home, seems to suggest a kind of ownership.
--Nupur
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