Scopophilia  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Scopophilia or scoptophilia, from Greek "love of looking", is deriving pleasure from looking. As an expression of sexuality, it refers to sexual pleasure derived from looking at erotic objects: erotic photographs, pornography, naked bodies, etc.

Psychoanalysis

The term was introduced to translate Freud's Schaulust, or pleasure in seeing. Freud considered pleasure in looking to be a regular partial instinct in childhood, which might be sublimated into interest in art, or alternatively become fixated into what the Rat man called "a burning and tormenting curiosity to see the female body".

Freud thought that inhibition of scopophilia might lead to actual disturbances of vision; other analysts have suggested that it might lead to a retreat from concrete objects into a world of abstractions.

Scopophilia was developed in the psychoanalytic theorizing of Otto Fenichel, with especial reference to identification. Fenichel maintained that "a child who is looking for libidinous purposes...wants to look at an object in order to 'feel along with him'". He also explored how looking could substitute for acting in those anxious to avoid guilt.

Jacques Lacan subsequently drew on Sartre's theory of the gaze to link scopophilia with the apprehension of the other: "the gaze is this object lost and suddenly refound in the conflagration of shame, by the introduction of the other". Lacan privileged scopophilia in his theory of how desire is captured by the imaginary image of the other; other French analysts have emphasised how the discovery of sexual difference in childhood, and the accompanying sense of not knowing subsequently fuels the scopophilic drive.

Cinema

Building on Lacan's work, scopophilia was used by cinema psychoanalysts of the 1970s to describe pleasures (often considered pathological) and other unconscious processes occurring in spectators when they watch films. Voyeurism and the Male gaze have been seen as central elements in such mainstream cinematic viewing, and are most famously discussed in Laura Mulvey's influential 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema".

Others however have objected to the element of scapegoating in such an analysis of the variegated pleasures of movie-viewing.

Race

Critical race theorists, such as bell hooks, David Marriott, and Shannon Winnubst, have also taken up scopophilia and the scopic drive as a mechanism to describe racial othering.

Here it is a question of fixing the appearance/identity of the other through the gaze, cultural scopophilia restricting the visible representations of racial identity that it privileges and/or allows.

Literary examples

• The Satyricon of Gaius Petronius Arbiter is pervaded with scopophilia, as when a priestess of Priapus was "the first to put an inquisitive eye to a crack she had naughtily opened, and spy on their play with prurient eagerness".

See also

• Evil eye
• Eye contact
• Feminist film theory
• I'll show you mine if you show me yours
• Lady Godiva
• Primal scene
• Scopophobia
• Voyeurism
• The Gaze

Further reading

• John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)
• Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (1989)