Between Flesh and Glass: Autoeroticism and Narcissism

Between Flesh and Glass: Autoeroticism and Narcissism

I have declined to write specifically about the problematic relationship with women that Freud exhibits in his writing simply because I feel this aspect has been explored very well by many of the greatest feminist thinkers and in order to even make an attempt at saying something not totally redundant I would have to reread a great volume of work to re-familiarize myself with the state of analysis and the argument as they stand. Instead I wish to explore the concept of the self that lies within the assumptions and aporia that Freud employs in his description of narcissism and “objectless” libidinal “aim” in the context of infantile sexuality and autoeroticism in general.

In what is perhaps the most controversial tract of the works on sexuality which we have examined, Freud characterizes infantile sexuality as autoerotic and narcissistic, at the same calling it “objectless”, presumably therefore pertaining only to the realm of the subject. But in the light both of the problematic central to Freud’s schema of desire and of the writings of Lacan on the Mirror Stage, we come up against a fragmentation of definition of the autoerotic, both in adult and infantile sexualities. Desire, aim, libido, we are told is masculine in nature, that is to say active. Leaving aside the problems of gender running throughout this work, we may wish to consider Freud’s concept of the active aim. The aim being active is in this schematic inclined to seek out its object, which is passive in nature. However the object itself is said to be actively emanating and creating the seductive power that draws the one who desires in towards it. This then shakes up the passive/active dichotomy considerably.

If we extend what we have gleaned above to the particular situation of autoeroticism we find yet another nexus of interpretative trouble, a “knot” to borrow Lacan’s favoured term: the love of Narcissus is that of the self for the imago of itself, and thus, in fact, the other. It is in the location of the image of the self beyond the fragmented limits of lived experience that constitutes one of the primary sited of desire, it is true but desire projected on the imago therefore most definitely has an object: the image of the self. Furthermore we see that the imago is phallic in nature…it forms the basis of the mirage of the self as complete, and consequently provides another instance of the phallic other, and this is in itself primary because of its relation, its “Echo” if you will, of the status of the phallic (M)other. The phallic, or in any case the complete, occupies the basis of our linguistic economy perhaps precisely because it constitutes the conceit on which we build our selves and on which we form our desire of others, and the relationship between the two. Thus the mirror image and the mirror stage is much more than the perceived cohesion of the fragmentary personhood of the pre verbal infant…looking into the mirror in fact constitutes an entire drama of desire and signification. Therefore we may quickly see that if the eroticism of infants is to be found in narcissistic tendencies Freud’s statement and its nature as object less is quickly annulled.

The only locus then for a truly objectless desire, if we are to understand “autoeroticism” at least on such terms as Freud provides us with, would thus be found in the infant prior to the mirror stage, whose concept and awareness of the body is without imago, or in a parallel economy of desires that figures throughout our lives, for if we are to take Lacan and Freud at their words, after 18 months there can be no place for the fragmented personality, and thus no place for the truly object less desire, the autoerotic, if we are to understand the term as stated above, and yet Freud posits exactly such a desire as central to the eroticism of infants. Much of the richness of Lacan’s approach to psychoanalysis is to be found in the tension of contrast, frustration and contradiction within the split nature of actual lived existence in relation to this desired phallic other that is the imago. Naturally if such a tension exists, despite the mirror, the child, the image and the mirage the fragmented self does persist. And then it is perhaps this persistent aspect of the pre mirror stage self making a sensual response to all it’s disparate parts that forms the autoerotic as defined by Freud. Whether actual autoeroticism is acted and perceived of in this manner is open to debate, but one thing is clear: if this consciousness does persist in dreams, the subconscious and indeed in autoeroticism it constitutes an alternate mode and model for desire, and a key into an alternate language of self and the erotic. It is perhaos this moment of jouissance that we think of when we contemplate a diffuse sexuality that stretches beyond the body, just as the pre mirror stage child has no sense of a break between himself and others its needs in this continuum (I avoid “desire” in this context) are also perceived as spread beyond objective limits. Although Freud seems convinced that it is women who are sites of repression, and retrograde in their development along the developmental teleological axis, it is men, also according to Freud who retain the same object and aim in their desire from infanthood into manhood, once the drama of the mirror and that of the oedipal attachment are enacted, and arguably before. However it may be in readdressing the content of that desire which so eludes Freud both in women and in men, the autoerotic, and the erogenous, that is to say the polymorphous perverse, that we may arrive at some alternatives in our approach to the complex truth of sexual and sensual experience and some destablizing alternatives too in our modern quest to construct ourselves in light of same. Somewhat macoronic though it may be: In masturbatio veritas, perhaps.