In his work “Fetishism”, S. Freud analyzes the concept of the fetish as a sexual disorder that consists in experiencing sexual arousal as a consequence of seeing a particular inanimate object.
Freud’s interpretations of fetishism:
“fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus which the little boy once believed in and does not wish to forego” (as cited in Clarke). The belief of the boy in the woman’s phallus causes the castration complex (Clarke);
fetishism is a direct result of the childhood trauma that occurs when a boy learns about the absence of a penis in women; the boy develops a fear that he himself may also be castrated;
the objects selected as fetish are not necessarily those that are a symbolical reflection of a penis: they are rather associated with the process of traumatic learning about woman’s missing penis (Clarke).
J. Lacan extends and reinterprets some of Freud’s ideas.
The fundamental concepts that constitute the basis for Lacan’s theories:
the concepts of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real which are the components of human psychic structure:
the Imaginary encompasses the illusory ideas of a human being of him or herself;
the Symbolic “refers to the customs, institutions, laws, mores, norms” (“Jacques Lacan”) etc that a person acquires in the process of social adaptation;
the Real consists of sublimation impulses of which a person is not aware;
the idea of “the mirror stage” of personality development at which children “identify their own images in reflective surfaces” (“Jacques Lacan”), in this way forming their ego;
the revision of the Oedipus complex: maternal and paternal Oedipal roles are seen as such that “potentially can be played by any number of possible persons of various sexes/genders” (“Jacques Lacan”);
the introduction of the concept of demand into Freud’s theory of the Libidinal economy, and therefore creating the triad “need-demand-desire” (“Jacques Lacan”).
J. Kristeva explains the influence of extralinguistic factors on language, which results in “revolutionary modes of cultural production” (“Revolution in Poetic Language”).
Kristeva’s main contributions made in her “Revolution in Poetic Language”:
the differentiation between semiotic and symbolic expressions of language:
the former is associated with gestures, voice etc;
the latter is associated with social impacts;
the interaction between the semiotic and the symbolic is responsible for the creation of poetic language.
The description of the concepts of:
“genotext” – the forces that “bring a text about” (“Revolution in Poetic Language”)
“phenotext” – the linguistic structure which is the result of the text creation process (“Revolution in Poetic Language”).
Works Cited
Clarke, Richard L.W. “Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” (1927).” Pdf. Web. 13 March 2016. “Jacques Lacan.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web. 13 March 2016.
“Revolution in Poetic Language by Julia Kristeva.” SlideServe. Web. 13 March 2016.
