Between the sign & the gaze

by Herman Rapaport

A woman turns into a piece of furniture (Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest); a writer of children's books takes photos of naked little girls (Lewis Carroll); Mont Blanc becomes the maternal breast (Shelley); Hamlet mistakes Ophelia for a phallus (Lacan's Hamlet seminar); and mom turns out to have thermonuclear arms (Laurie Anderson's United States). Reviewing the ways in which women have been fantasized across nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western culture, Herman Rapaport offers a series of brilliant insights into the concept of the fantasm in modern art. This gathering of new and previously published essays centers on a key question in psychoanalytic theory - the primacy of visual (iconic) versus linguistic (auditory) realms in the construction of fantasy. Rapaport first provides a lucid analysis of the historical development of the French psychoanalytic concept of the fantasm - which includes such phenomena as dramas and daydreams, delusions, hallucinations, primal scenes, imaginary