THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS, Part Two

[Note: this is the second installment of an essay, "Coppelius, Oedipus, and the Phallic Stare: a rare instance of bidirectional cognitive metaphor?" being posted serially. Below Dunster recommends that the reader scroll down and view the sections in ascending order.]

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Conceptual metaphors and Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic theory, with a different end in mind, has been responsible for some of the farthest-reaching discussions of conceptual metaphors. Fetishism, for example, relies on the metaphorical connection between the phallus and other concepts. Most psychoanalytic discourse does not mention metaphor by name, but this is simply because the terminology of the early twentieth century, and indeed that of today’s general public, reserves the term for metaphorical linguistic expressions. Psychoanalytic theorists might therefore see the term “metaphor” as making light of their theory, but the cognitive linguistic view assigns great importance to mappings supported by conceptual metaphors.

The metaphor
Among the several conceptual metaphors proposed by Sigmund Freud, one stands out as particularly interesting to the field. This metaphor, mentioned by Freud inexplicitly and almost in passing, is THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS. Under a bit of scrutiny, this concept quickly moves from ridiculous to noteworthy to downright fascinating.

In his famous 1919 essay, “The ‘Uncanny’” (“Das ‘Unheimliche’”), Freud attempts to discover the criteria for the instantiation of an uncanny event. He spends a large part of the essay investigating the German gothic classic, Der Sandmann, by E.T.A. Hoffman, whom Freud elsewhere calls “the unrivalled master of the uncanny in poetry.” The story features a young man, Nathaniel, who has suffered from a phobia of losing his eyes since a traumatic incident in his childhood. He links the man responsible for this incident, Coppelius, with the mythical Sandman, who supposedly enters children’s bedrooms at night to pour sand in their eyes. The bleeding spheres then jump out of the victims’ heads for the Sandman to collect and carry back to his lair, where he feeds them to his children. Nathaniel’s terror returns when, as a young adult, he is accosted by an eyeglass salesman named Coppola, who, Nathaniel is convinced, is really the same man as Coppelius, back from a lengthy exile.

Freud’s discussion leads him to consider the fear of losing one’s eyes in general, citing a number of cases to indicate that “no physical injury is so much dreaded by [adults] as an injury to the eye” (Freud, 1919: 938). He goes on to claim that the fear of losing one’s eyes actually tends to be nothing less than a placeholder for castration anxiety. This, he says, is often apparent in dreams, fantasies and myths. Indeed, “the self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration—the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talionis” (Freud, 1919: 938). Freud counters the view of opponents that it is simply natural for an organ as precious as the eye to be guarded proportionally to the phallus, and the slightly bolder view that castration anxiety is simply one form of that type of rational fear of losing an organ, by claiming that this stance cannot account for data from dreams, myths, and fantasies, “nor can it dispel the impression that the threat of being castrated in especial excites a peculiarly violent and obscure emotion, and that this emotion is what first gives the idea of losing other organs its intense coloring” (Freud, 1919: 938). [2005 note: A professor pointed out to me that Freud's claim "sounds (eerily, perhaps, or uncannily) very much like certain forms of generative grammar discourse." Some readers will find this comment amusing.]

Regardless of one’s position with respect to psychoanalytic theory, Freud’s THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS metaphor has physical, psychological, and even linguistic merit. We will approach these areas individually, but will find that they are hardly separable.

There are two perspectives from which we must view this relation, determined by two predominant interpretations of the phallus. One is the Freudian/Lacanian interpretation of the phallus as a somewhat abstract signifier, simultaneously defining male subjectivity and female objectivity. In this case, the phallus is not really the male organ, but an abstract concept existing, according to Freud, in the unconscious, and, according to Lacan, also in language. The other interpretation is simply the anatomical feature, the erect penis.

The eye must also be considered with regard to its non-physical (psychological, mythological, etc.) significance as well as its anatomical role. For the latter, we can further examine both the structure and the function of the physical eye. Though a conceptual metaphor’s source domain is, by definition, that domain which is necessary in order to understand the target domain, we will not spend much time characterizing the physical interpretation of the phallus, since another assumption of a cognitive metaphor is that the source domain is already fairly well understood.