Scotomization is a psychological term for the mental blocking of unwanted perceptions, analogous to the visual blindness of an actual
scotoma
A scotoma is an area of partial alteration in the field of vision consisting of a partially diminished or entirely degenerated visual acuity that is surrounded by a field of normal – or relatively well-preserved – vision.
Every normal mam ...
.
Controversies
Reviving in the 1920s a term initially used by
Charcot in connection with
hysteria, the French analysts
Rene Laforgue and
Edouard Pinchon introduced the idea of scotomization into
psychoanalysis
PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might b ...
– a move initially welcomed by Freud in 1926 as a useful description of the hysterical avoidance of distressing perceptions. The following year, however, he attacked the term for suggesting that the perception was wholly blotted out (as with
a retina's blind spot), whereas his clinical experience showed that on the contrary intense psychic measures had to be taken to keep the unwanted perception out of consciousness. A debate followed between Freud and Laforgue, further illuminated by Pinchon's 1928 article on 'The Psychological Significance of Negation in French', where he argued that "The French language expresses the desire for ''scotomisation'' through the
''forclusif''."
Decades later in the 1950s, the question of scotomization re-emerged in a
phenomological context under the influence of
Jacques Lacan. Lacan used scotomization to represent the
ego's relationship to the unconscious – speaking of "everything that the ego, neglects, scotomizes, misconstrues in...reality" – as well as to challenge
Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology), a French playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and lite ...
's concept of the
gaze
In critical theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, the gaze (French ''le regard''), in the philosophical and figurative sense, is an individual's (or a group's) awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. The concept ...
. Most significantly of all, however, he developed it into his influential update of Pinchon's concept of foreclosure, thus endowing that idea with a conflation of visual and verbal elements.
[M. Jay, ''Downcast Eyes'' (1993) p. 356]
See also
References
{{Reflist, 2}
External links
Scotomization
Abnormal psychology
Defence mechanisms