Responses to ‘Anxiety in the Eyes’

Pierre Fédida's text starts from castration anxiety and ends with castration anxiety, but the trajectory it follows in this closing of the circle is an ingenious one. The double anxiety in the eyes/anxiety of the eyes remains productively open, allowing the reader to find their own accent and balance (from in to of and back again), in the company of both Freud and Fédida. From the outset, we are met with a difficult question: how does a genital qualification of an organ occur? By engaging this question, the text contributes to a direction I would call ‘psychoanalysis of organs’, which takes seriously the organ as a site of anxiety (and, I would add, as a site of signification), and investigates some fascinating semi-autonomous qualities of organs. I have been following the forms that a ‘psychoanalysis of organs’ takes in the work of Sándor Ferenczi (1919, 1926, 1932), who has written about ‘organ neurosis’ (1926) and even more curious phenomena such as ‘organ individuality’ (1924, p. 82) or the ‘cooperation of organs’ (1924, p. 82) - a distinctively relational idea.

Fédida's constructions on the genital qualification of the eye opens a series of questions that are crucial in contemporary psychoanalytic debates. What is the relationship between the ego and the organ? And: what is the relationship between the psyche and the soma? Some of the passages I appreciated most in Fédida's text are experimenting with ways of re-embodying the organ. In Freud's work on hysterical conversion the organ/limb was rendered as ‘mere matter’, in the service of the psyche, mouldable and transformable through the power of the psyche. Fédida reiterates this language of ‘mastery’ of the ego over the organ, which I believe is active in Freud's work. In short, the ego loses the mastery over the organ when the organ is subject to an over-cathexis. But what happens when the idea of ‘mastery’ can no longer encompass the relation of the ego w