Evan's Four Questions

Fetishism: "it [the fetish] remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a safeguard against it" (2). Given the way that Freud describes the fetish as forming from a kind of instinctual or survivalist need, I couldn't help but wonder how this might help characterize other fetishistic creations. Is the act of gift giving perhaps a response to a fear of isolation, or the fetish of money perhaps a response to the impermanence of material wealth in that it fixes it to an unchanging solid number?

Sexual Aberrations: "A certain degree of fetishism is thus habitually present in normal love..." (20). Freud glosses over this "normal" fetishism and uses is primarily to contrast with the aberrant sort, but I wonder not simply about how this fetish comes about, but how this fetish is received in the process of "normal" love. With the stigma that becomes associated with the aberrants and so their fetishes, fetishism has, if anything, become a fetish itself for abnormality. How does the "normal" lover relate to his or her fetish, and what does the partner make of someone else's fetish. This seems to me more inherently an anthropological than a psychiatric question but one that interests me nonetheless.

Infantile sexuality: "it [infantile sexuality] attaches itself to one of the vial somatic functions; it has as yet no sexual object" (48). It is interesting to me that there seems to be a sense that a return to infantile sexuality (auto-eroticism and objectless, fetishistic pleasure) are identified as the abnormal or as the fetishizing. Just by Freud's analogizing between sexuality and all other basic somatic functions, it seems increasingly strange that this particular one of sexuality needs to fetishize personal needs with some other object. How strange too that this object must be another agent who fetishizes their own somatic needs. I guess my question would be why is it natural that sexuality be fetishized externally? Just that that's how biology works?

Transformation of Puberty: "the eye is perhaps the zone most remote from the sexual object" (75). I was intrigued by this idea that the eye could be seen (no pun intended) as on the same level as other erotogenic zones. What is interesting about the eye is that its only stimulation comes in imagining the touch (this is a completely unqualified claim, I'm just asserting that here). It seems as though the eye imagines the touch imagines the.... eventually ending in sexual fulfillment. If we can establish this progression then, where does it start? My question here would be what is the most preliminary and anticipatory stage of sexual gratification? Is it the eye? Or can we go further and say that some unknowable part of the mind imagines first what the eye will see? Where is the sex-drive, in other words.

Hollis' Freud Questions

Xerox:
How does the suggestion that “everything has to be paid for in one way or another” become relevant in a discourse of commodity? How is trauma become essential in this dialogue of remuneration?

I.
Can the concept of ‘instinct’ be situated or juxtaposed with Marx’s theory of the human and the sensuous?

II.
On a footnote that runs from 59-60, Freud suggests that the manifestation of sexual symbolism coincides with the first years of speech. Stewart also uses language as a tool to pry open object relations. Is this a sort of linguistic determinism, or is it the inverse? Can Freud’s terminology be seen as furthering a commodification of sexual experience?

III.
On page 88 Freud suggests that the ‘finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.’ How can this theory of recovery be seen as relative to the trauma of loss in Weiner?

*** Interesting to note that page 88 has caught everyone' attention thusfar

Hans' Freud Questions

1. The Sexual Aberrations

pg 35: Why does Freud wait until he splits the sexual instinct into ‘component instincts’ before defining the concept, qualities, and problems of the human sexual instinct?

2. Infantile Sexuality

pg 52: On page 52 Freud describes the ‘gift’ of fecal matter as a form of surrendering the masturbatory stimulus in order to achieve compliance with care givers. Are “surrender” and “compliance” universal qualities inherent in the act of giving? Second question: How does one determine the difference between fecal matter retained in order to achieve a masturbatory stimulus and fecal matter as a ‘gift’? By the size of the present?

3. Puberty

pg 88: “There are thus good reasons why a child sucking at his mother’s breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.” Does the breast as an originating object turn us all into nostalgic creatures, continually working to recapture the past? Can nostalgia manifest itself through an unconscious act of “refinding”?

4. Fetishism

Can we trace Freud’s concept of “denial” as a universal agent operating throughout the various definitions of the fetish and fetishism that fall outside the realm of psychoanalysis?

Jonathan's Questions for Freud

The Aberrations: "...in surprisingly numerous individuals, the nature and importance of the sexual object recedes into the background. What is essential and constant in the sexual instinct is something else" (15). Where does Freud draw the line between dispersing sexuality into different elements and unifying it into something 'essential and constant? Why is he so adamant about preserving something essential and constant when his project at this stage is precisely that of de-essentializing sexuality?

Infant Sex: On page 64 Freud refers to thumb-sucking as a relic of breastfeeding. In what ways is he transforming or dividing up sexuality into knowable things, which gain their own histories and characteristics? More importantly, what cultural effect does this have on the experience of sexuality and consciousness in general?

Puberty: "The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it" (88). Is he positing an originary object, or is the Oedipal origin merely a provisional method of description? How does this relate to ideas of the gift, in terms of the supposedly unique quality of gifted items?

Fetishism: "Probably no male human is spared the shock of threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals" (163). Is this meant literally? Is it meant universally?

-Jonathan

I will actually be writing on THE FROZEN

not the perishable. 

-Hollis Mickey

The Disposable

I am going to write on the disposable.
- George

i'm doing the Automatic

--pablo