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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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Saya Kantarovsky, Removal, 2018, oil and watercolor on linen, 55 ¼ x 40 ¼ in. Copyright the artist, courtesy the artist. Photograph by Adam Reich. “A Child Is Being Beaten” is the strange title of Freud’s 1919 paper on sexual fantasy. This sentence, one of sadomasochistic, masturbatory enjoyment and announced from an unspecified source, indicates the phantasmatic scene admitted to by several of his patients. What are these beating fantasies? Freud says it is “not clearly sexual, not in itself sadistic, but yet the stuff from which both will later come.” He’s trying to reach back to some primordial core of our subjectivity, centered on sexuality, the first outlines of guilt, and the desire for punishment. Also: the place where the prohibition against incest barely holds up in its commandment. The paper feels utterly wild—so many surprising elements are condensed into the phantasmatic image of an adult beating a child (usually a paternal representative, though sometimes the mother is present). Importantly, Freud notes, these aren’t the musings of perverse patients but rather the revelation of common daydreams—perhaps even unconscious universal scripts, that graft childhood experience with cultural mores. Emulsion, 2017, oil, watercolor, and pastel on canvas, 85 x 65 ⅛ in. Copyright the artist, courtesy the artist. Photograph by Robert Glowacki. The fantasy is first a way of admitting sexual enjoyment, in tandem with the punishment and guilt one may feel for having it. There are also the outlines of a traumatic memory, according to Freud, of seeing other children punished, and wondering about this particular scene: What is loved and hated by these adults, what is good and what is bad—what, in essence, makes for authority? A potential identification with power is offered by the fantasy, the desire to be the one who beats, set against the one who is beaten. This impulse does the work of hiding a feeling of subjection, of utter helplessness; what we feel when our desire for another is so strong that we risk being harmed by them. In the fantasy, we are everywhere and nowhere in the plot lines—the beater, the beaten, […]
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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