ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has consistently adopted a stance of suspicion in relation to the realm of the visible, intimately bound as it would seem to be to the register of consciousness. The psychical layer Freud designated perception-consciousness is frequently deceived, caught from behind by unconscious forces which evade its gaze and which are far more determinant in the constitution of subjectivity. Stephen Heath goes so far as to specify the birth of psychoanalysis as a rejection of vision as a mode of organizing and apprehending psychical phenomena. Freud’s most important move, from this perspective, lies in the displacement from the “look” to the “voice,” from the visible to language. Charcot analyzed hysteria with the aid of a series of photographs depicting women in various stages of the disease. For Heath, this series of photographs is a pre-figuration of the cinema—a cinema which is thus placed ineluctably on the side of the pre-Freudian. Freud rejected the photographic techniques of Charcot in favor of the analytic session in which contact with the patient was achieved through speech, association, interpretation of linguistic lapses. According to Heath,
Charcot sees, Freud hears … Psychoanalysis is the anti-visible; significant in this respect, moreover, are Freud’s distrust of projects for rendering analysis on the screen and, conversely, the powerful social desire to bring that same analysis into sight, the fascination of so many films with psychoanalysis. 1
