Anxiety in the Eyes

Anxiety of the eyes, or perhaps rather anxiety in the eyes; one might ask if this expression implies that, when it comes to the organ of sight, the organ is essentially genital?1

What does this mean? The unfamiliar term Augenangst, which is used by Freud in his essay ‘The “Uncanny”’, should not be taken as equivalent to the ultimately rather banal fear of ‘losing one's eyes’ (Freud, 1919, p. 231). If it is indeed, as they say, phantasmatic, the expression doesn't tell us anything when, as is the case in a recent translation, we simply render it as ‘ocular anxiety’ [angoisse oculaire] (Freud, 1985, p. 231). Moreover, if banality is one of the forms borrowed by repression, one might ask if the fear of losing one's sight, commonly found in clinical work, is not already a weakened form of the fantasy of enucleation. We should for this reason focus all our attention on the intensity of the threat which makes the organ of sight the very site of anxiety itself.

So Augenangst is anxiety both because it affects sight, but also because it arises through vision and touches the eyes. The interest of the expression used by Freud is not only that it identifies the displacement of castration anxiety onto ‘so precious an organ as the eye’ (Freud, 1919, p. 231), but because it proposes the hypothesis that anxiety is castration anxiety because it is an affect of sight, where sight is affected by fantasy. The genital qualification of the organ - serving as the prototype for the hypochondriac representation of all the organs - should not be conceived independently of this visual determination which anxiety reveals even at the level of language. In analytic treatment we observe the prevalence of a