# The gaze and the experience of the foreign

Rajaa Stitou

► To cite this version:

Rajaa Stitou. The gaze and the experience of the foreign. Ágora: Estudos em Teoria Psicanalítica, 2019, 22 (1), pp.1-7. 10.1590/S1516-14982019001001 . hal-02461002

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THE GAZE AND THE EXPERIENCE OF THE FOREIGN

RAJAA STITOU ¹; ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1789-6897

¹Universidade Aix
Marseille, Membro do
Laboratório de
Psicologia Clínica,
Psicopatologia e
Psicanálise, Marseille,
França.

**ABSTRACT:** What is more foreign to us than our own unconscious, showing us a limit to what can be seen and said? The author shows that not only is the foreign inscribed in the gaze, a gaze that cannot be reduced to the visible, but that it lies at the very heart of the human subject. Its irruption at various occasions, including when travelling between different countries, confronts us with what divides us and remains an enigma. This challenging experience mobilises our subjectivity, calling for a unique solution. Far from always being a sign of pathology, it can lead to inventive action, as shown by artistic and rite-of-passage experiences. The author's approach relies on what is transmitted to us by psychoanalysis, primarily highlighting the work of Freud.

**Keywords:** foreign; the gaze;; the unconscious; depersonalisation; inventiveness; rite of passage.

**Resumo:** O olhar e a prova do estrangeiro. O que poderia causar um sentimento de estranheza maior, ao ser humano, do que seu inconsciente que lhe mostra os limites de sua capacidade de ver e dizer? Esse artigo procura demonstrar que o estrangeiro não está apenas inscrito no olhar, um olhar que não se restringe ao visível, mas que se encontra no âmago do sujeito. Sua irrupção, a cada evento ocasional, inclusive ao mudar de país, confronta o sujeito com o que o divide e se torna um enigma para ele. Esse enigma representa uma verdadeira prova que mobiliza a subjetividade do indivíduo e a necessidade de um recurso singular para lidar com ele. Essa prova não revela necessariamente uma psicopatologia. Ela pode dar origem à inventividade, como mostram as experiências artísticas e iniciáticas. Para embasar a sua abordagem, a autora toma, como ponto de apoio e como horizonte, os conhecimentos da psicanálise, principalmente a contribuição freudiana.

**Palavras-chave:** estrangeiro; olhar; inconsciente; despersonalização; inventividade; experiência iniciática.

DOI - http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1516-14982019001001

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articulates as the other type of “foreclosure of sens” (LACAN, 1975-1976, p. 320). Because of this characteristic shared by neuroses, psychoses and perversions, “derealizations and depersonalizations are intimately connected” (FREUD, 1936, p. 227). He writes that these feelings of strangeness “arise very frequently in certain mental diseases, but they are not unknown among normal people, just as hallucinations occasionally occur in the healthy” (*idem*). What they all have in common is that they are defense mechanisms, trying to “keep something out of us” (*idem*). However, he explains, the new elements that can trigger a defense reaction “approach the ego from two directions—from the real external world and from the internal world of thoughts and impulses that emerge in the ego. It is possible that this alternative coincides with the choice between derealizations proper and de-personalizations” (*idem*).

STENDHAL SYNDROME

This feeling of strangeness<fnref n="1" /> cannot but remind us of what the Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini has called “Stendhal syndrome” (1990), referring to a curious episode experienced by the French writer and described in his book Rome, Naples and Florence (1987). While visiting the Basilica of Santa-Croce for the first time, Stendhal suddenly felt strong anxiety while contemplating Volterrano’s frescoes. He was only able to calm down by reading Foscolo’s poem Sepulchres, which was inspired by the Basilica, the burial site of some of the most illustrious Italians. According to Magherini and as reported by A. and G. Haddad (1995, p. 84), many of the travellers visiting Florence have experienced a malaise similar to Stendhal’s. “Their mood sinks, they become depressed and sometimes have a strong feeling of their limits becoming blurred, a feeling of fragmentation and a sense of leaving their body.” This temporary disturbance, linked to the emotional impact of the work of art, the “power of the image”, is subject to cultural differences. For example, an Italian who has lived all his whole life surrounded by religious images would be less affected by them than travellers from other backgrounds. Likewise, an American, whose gaze is supposedly framed by other mythological references, experiences this “image shock” much less intensely than a European. The expressions of this disturbance or emotional reaction vary across cultures, but also depend on the ways in which individuals uniquely participate in them and can take on different and less spectacular forms (such as speechlessness).

Magherini writes that Stendhal syndrome can trigger a mental confusion, which in some cases turns into a hallucinatory episode. Nevertheless, we cannot put such cases and the experience of derealisation, which is not necessarily pathological, into the same category. The disturbance described by Magherini can manifest in any individual confronted with the experience of exile or with a new element that disrupts his or her routines and changes the way he or she sees the world.

This irruption of the foreign, which is none other than the unconscious and can only be experienced, disconnects words from things, the signifier from the signified. It abolishes the categories of time (the unconscious knows nothing about chronological time) and familiar perceptions, making space for a strangely intimate feeling of not having a unified self, leading to a state of confusion. What is stranger to a human being than his unconscious, showing him the limits of what can be seen and said?

This foreign dimension concerns all human subjects, regardless of their psychotic or neurotic structure. However, in psychosis, what would otherwise be repressed is instead encountered in the real, via hallucinations or as a delusion.

In neurosis, the return of the repressed leads to the formations of the unconscious, showing us that what is most intimate to us can simultaneously appear as the most alien. Freud shows that the emergence of the unconscious in dreams, slips of the tongue and witticisms but also in certain encounters and works of art, are

<footnote n="1">¹ [Translator’s note: The author uses the expression sentiment d’étrangeté, the habitual French translation of Freud’s *Entfremdungsgefühl*, which the Standard Edition renders as “derealisation”, for example in *A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis*. Where appropriate and in keeping with the author’s larger argument, I have also used a literal translation to maintain the resonance with *l’étranger* as the foreign, as radical otherness.</footnote>
presented to us as riddles to be deciphered, making us wonder, after the fact: *What has just happened? What does it mean?* or think *No, this cannot be me*.

Freud often said that in regard to this enigmatic other place, artists tend to be the avant-garde. This other place, which influences all creators, is inherent to any representation; however, it also constitutes its "beyond", because all creative works also transmit something unspeakable, something that needs a form to make itself be seen. This unspeakable is conveyed, for example, by the rhythm of a song or the lines of a poem. In this sense, the creative process resembles dream-work.

## THE ORDEAL OF THE FOREIGN AND INVENTIVENESS

According to Freud, both dreams and works of art are “the imaginary satisfactions of unconscious wishes” (FREUD, 1925, p. 112) and subject to the same processes. The dream initially consists of visual, sonorous and tactile images, which are then related through speech and interpreted. It is by virtue of emerging from oblivion that the memory of a dream can be interpreted.

If the dreamer, the subject of this unconscious desire, is located on the side of the signifier, i.e., following the logic of lack rather than logic of meaning, what can we say about the artist's relationship to the unspeakable?

He or she translates it into a unique aesthetic form, metaphorises it via an image, in the sense that Plato defines it in Timaeus: "Since even the conditions of an image's occurrence lie outside the image itself – since it is an ever-moving apparition of something else – it has to occur in something other than itself (and so somehow or other to cling to existence), or it would be nothing at all" (PLATO, 1970, 52c3-5). The work of art transmits an enigma that testifies to the "relation with the unknown" (ROSOLATO, 1978), yet imposes on it the limits of a particular form, using a language that, while possibly shared with others, does not foreclose this enigmatic dimension. In this way, it can leave the chaos of formlessness from which it has emerged, and a work of mourning begins, eventually allowing the author to consent to a loss. This opens up the possibility of sublimation, which is not an end in itself, but, in a movement from loss to discovery, rekindles desire, pointing it towards new horizons.

This movement from formlessness to the shaping of the work is always unique. It has been described by certain authors as the difficult ordeal of the foreign, a path of initiation that transmutes the relationship to the unknown, trans-forming it into a relation of inventiveness. It is worth listening to each author speak about this process him or herself; however, I will only focus on a few key points.

For Michel de M'Uzan, the creative work carries a trace of the psychic state that presided at its birth. He describes the creative pathway as a kind of moulting, a genuine metamorphosis, a dramatic rather than idyllic experience (DE M'UZAN, 1977, p. 4). Its struggle stems from the fact that it is not just the life drives that are at work in it, but also the death drive. M'Uzan distinguishes between:

**A moment of "shock"** [saisissement] (ibidem, p. 6), which he describes as traumatic. This is an initial moment of inspiration, in which the real emerges, disrupting the subject's "economic peace" and threatening his identity. This involves new demands coming from the drives and requires a change in the subject's position towards himself and the world. There is a feeling of strangeness and a "blurring of boundaries".

**The second moment**, which is of vital importance and appears as a pressing need, corresponds to a movement "from discontinuity to continuity" (ibidem, p. 8). This period stages the scene of the subject's "confrontation" with the mass of excitation threatening to overwhelm him or her. The beginning of a new arrangement creates new possibilities by elaborating the traumatic experience and translating it into forms and images.

**The third moment** is the return "to a new reality of a radical metamorphosis, which still betrays the chaos and violent conflicts over which order has been established" (ibidem, p. 10). We should nevertheless keep in mind that although M'Uzan describes the creative process as following a certain logic of meaning, it should by no means be seen as linear or as leading from a beginning to an end. Grasping its beginning can only be a kind of
illusion. What it shows us is nothing other than the ordeal of the foreign, in other words, the experience of a new loss, based on which something beyond the known will occur by means of an oeuvre, via a nomination.

Anton Ehrenzweig speaks about the creative process as a temporary madness that transcends the limits of rational thought. He uses the term unconscious “scanning”, alluding to not only subjective dispersion and chaos, but also the idea of scansion (EHRENZWEIG, 1971, p. 9). To him, the creative process also consists of three stages:

**The "schizoid" and persecutory stage**, where we see the emergence of chaos and a partial fragmentation of the ego, the parts of which are then projected into the work.

**The "dedifferentiation" stage** (*ibidem*, p. 33) or "unconscious scanning", which, akin to romantic passion or mystical ecstasy, destabilises the limits between the subject and the world, stripping objects of their concrete materiality. During this stage, Ehrenzweig also speaks about a "manic ocean limit", referring to the wave of excitation that sweeps over the artist, while deep down the creative process is already at work.

The **moment of the return** to oneself: consciousness returns and something new has emerged from the chaos. However, this return to reality triggers a depression, which requires strength to resist the "almost anal disgust that would make us sweep the whole mess into the waste-paper basket" (*ibidem*, p. 103). The anxiety of persecution is superseded by the anxiety of loss and a sense of failure, because the object can never be grasped fully.

Finally, Catherine Clement (1990), taking up Ehrenzweig's analysis, speaks about a "syncope", a dissolution of the subject, to describe this confrontation with the foreign as a precondition for the production of an oeuvre. This "syncopated and fertile moment" is also marked by an "unspeakable enjoyment", which provokes the fading of the subject and leaves behind a remainder: the work of art that marks a cut, the *objet a* of Lacan's formula, the "object-cause of desire", always missed and impossible to name.

These different approaches demonstrate that each creative experience contains, at its core, a dimension of the unknown, whose emergence profoundly challenges the subject and whose intensity corroborates the link Freud makes between the derealisation and depersonalisation. If this confrontation is to be effective or creative, it has to be mediated through language via a form, image or a name, albeit without being reducible to either of these elements. Hence the possibility of reinvention, of perpetual reconstruction, each time creating a new opportunity of a crossing over, a moulting or a renaissance, opening our gaze to what lies beyond the visible and welcoming the world that has been made anew.

In this way, the foreign, the unspeakable, is given a form in a work this movement reminds us of initiation rites, which are, as I would now like to show, highly instructive.

## THE EXPERIENCE OF INITIATION

The creative experience is in fact very close to initiation in the cycle of mutations and metamorphoses. Initiation is both an opening and a defence against the ungraspable dimension of the human subject, both within and outside us. It is concerned with what has been celebrated by naming, images and symbols since humans invented language. It creates and renews the social link.

For Eliade, all initiation rites include a ritual death, followed by a resurrection or a rebirth (ELIADE, 1959, p. 144). This moment of transformation makes it possible to bring the past onto the scene of the future.

The ritual death, often symbolised by the shadows or a cosmic night, has to do with the chaos, an exemplary expression of "the paradoxical point of passage from one mode of being to another" (*ibidem*, p. 26).

Yet all creation is a kind of regeneration, Eliade writes. The regeneration described by him is often compared to a mystical experience. The great Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi (1994) speaks about this symbolic rebirth as a contemplative journey, reflecting on oneself and the world, the existence of which depends on perpetual
transformation. He distinguishes between the horizontal dimension of this journey, which concerns its spatial
geography, and the vertical dimension as a movement from the outside towards the inside and beyond,
towards transcendence, towards the unknown. This verticality, the very foundation of the movement of
existence, is a form of renewal.

In his view, the voyage (*Safar, asfar*), the Arabic root of which contains the notion of unveiling (*isfar*), can
bear spiritual fruit (*natya, natay*), evoking the idea of childbirth.

The unveiling gives the traveller access to “the most mysterious secrets, as its light dispels all illusions”;
it suggests a movement from the inaccessible aspects of the divine (symbolised by *ama* or blindness) to the
manifestation of attribution conceivable by created beings (1994).

"God can be grasped by neither intellect nor speculation" (ibidem, p. 75). Because of human weakness,
this voyage, which Ibn Arabi describes as perplexity (*hayra*) or bedazzlement, is not without its dangers:
"However, whoever sets off on this journey is immediately seized with natural worry, a tightness of chest and
with fear, because from the very beginning of his path he can see his weakness approaching. But this weakness
gives him dignity and force" (ibidem, p. 76). What the traveller discovers is that this indefinitely approachable
Other is both attractive and terrifying, manifesting right where it escapes us, already vanishing as it appears.

This movement of presence/absence, of veiling/unveiling, should not be understood, the author writes,
via the dualist logic of thesis/antithesis or negation/affirmation. It can only evoke the subject's division, a
division that cannot be reduced to any discursive contradiction.

Ibn Arabi's journey is also a voyage of the gaze. Yet it is equally a voyage of the breath, of movement,
sounds, of the voice which, while being subject to the laws of language, constantly transmits, in myriad
different forms, something beyond what can be perceived. Because the unknown permeates all human
constructions, the traveller cannot become affixed to any one of them. He becomes the container of all forms,
because the naming possibilities of language are infinite. In language, like in the unconscious, we are always
already displaced, always far away from home.

This is also revealed by the aesthetic vertigo of the creative act. Contrary to common discourse, which
tries to conceal any perception of what cannot be understood, the creative act invites us to go precisely where
meaning comes undone. It alludes to the unthinkable: *Look at what you cannot see. Listen to what has no
meaning. Speak about what you cannot say.*

Isn't this unthinkable also carried by each unconscious gesture and perception, which the logic of
meaning seeks to conceal?

However, the logical discourse should not be confounded with *significance*, which highlights what is
constantly stealing away and escapes all codification. Linked to the founding lack of being, this continuous
seeping away of meaning is sustained by what Freud calls the primary process – a process of displacement
and condensation, of perceptions and sensations which continues to mark its presence throughout our lives,
day and night, in each of our dreams.

The creative act, which requires us to “let go”, is a response of what escapes us. It is the guarantor of the
unknown. There can be no creative act without a cut, which means that nothing will be as it was. This act
restores to language its enigmatic nature, welcoming it with open arms.

Should this dimension, which artists are so good at relating, not be given more attention in an age
dominated by the cult of the visible? Not as a kind of standardised interpretative framework, but as a new
theorisation of the unthinkable, the non-representable, that which cannot be perceived but instead marks
each perception, regardless of its kind: visual, auditory, olfactory, cutaneous, motoric, etc.

This detour through the questions of creativity and the initiatory experience has shown us that the way
in which subjects or collectives manage their relationship to the foreign testifies to the strength of their
constructive and creative abilities. It can therefore have a pacifying influence, stirring us towards
inventiveness.
However, what about the effects of fear or anxiety that can bring ruin or even disaster? In this case, the foreign is no longer recognized as part of oneself or as a vehicle of openness. Instead, it is projected outside or perceived as a threat to be dealt with. This refusal has nefarious effects on both the subject and the social link, as evidenced by everyday clinical experience with individuals who perceive the enigma within themselves as a handicap, one that they sometimes try to displace onto others not like them, in a furious effort to draw a line between the inside and the outside, to fetishize difference (STITOU, 2012). In my experience, their suffering often manifests as an inhibition, an inability to construct or create. This subjective position is at times fuelled by the social gaze, which sees the foreign as a danger rather than a potential asset.

This foreignness, constantly veiled and unveiled, remembered and repeated in new contexts, with each new hardship, constitutes the rebellious aspect of each human subject. However, it also refers to the obscure point of any civilisation that humans struggle to understand or reject, and which is at the origin of our suffering, our creativity and also our ruin.

**Received:** January 17, 2017. **Accepted:** June 30, 2017

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Rajaa Stitou

Membro do Laboratório de Psicologia Clínica, Psicopatologia e Psicanálise da Universidade Aix Marseille, Marseille, França. rstitou@wanadoo.fr.

Kristina Valendinova

Traduzido do francês por Kristina Valendinova/Translated from French by Kristina Valendinova.

Doutora e Pesquisadora Associada do Centro de Pesquisa em Psicanálise, Medicina e Sociedade da Universidade de Paris 7 Diderot. Paris, França.