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[T]he weak spot in their development is to be looked for somewhere between the stages of auto-erotism, narcissism and homosexuality.
The following brief comments concerning the case of Freud's female paranoiac analysand (‘A case of paranoia running counter to the psycho-analytic theory of the disease’) (Freud, 1915a: S. E. XIV, 263) represent, in broad outline, some of the aspects of what we will call the auto-erotic weak spot of the paranoiac.
‘Lying partly undressed on the sofa beside her lover … a most attractive and handsome girl was “admired”, without any sexual act having taken place and perhaps even any contact.’
In this sequence, one can discern the very nature of the trauma suffered by the analysand; it contains, in a condensed form, the circumstances and reasons for the onset of her delusion. For this young paranoiac woman, finding herself in the arms of a man is already a traumatic situation, owing to the loss of the homosexual tie with a more or less desexualised object,1 namely, ‘her elderly mother’ doubled by ‘an elderly lady’. To this loss, which is a frequent motive for decompensation in paranoiacs, entailing a true rupture in the permanence of their sense of identity closely linked to the homosexual double, is added here the absence of heterosexual fulfilment. This situation, difficult for any woman, became insurmountable in her case; feeling frustrated, she could not make up for it through the pleasure ‘of being admired’; for, according to the hypothesis that we shall be developing in this work, the paranoiac does not have an erotogenic body susceptible of being exhibited. Without the bulwark of a truly erotogenic body that this analysand had been unable to constitute, the gaze of the young man, fascinated by his sexual, and perhaps uninhabited object, was
intolerable. If the other person did not speak to her or touch her, or if his words and his acts were simply extensions of his gaze, the young woman, fascinated herself, with her i