|
Sorry to bring up l'affaire Blunkett so soon after Christmas,
but I've been pondering the connection between blindness and sex.
Does a sightless person have access to unguessed-at areas of feeling
in the boudoir? Do the eyes matter all that much when it comes
to making the beast with two backs?
Then I stumbled on a remarkable passage in Ved Mehta's 2001
book All For Love,
now republished by Granta Books. Mehta is the most brilliant blind
writer after Milton and Borges, and his speculations on sight
and enlightenment are always worth reading. In this memoir, he
discusses with his psychoanalyst, Robert Bak, the connection between
eyes and genitalia.
Dr Bak is convinced that people often confuse the two and make
a big fuss of the beauty, warmth etc of a lover's eyes because
they're debarred, by social taboo, from describing their rude
bits. Thinking or talking about people's eyes is, he says, a form
of sexual displacement activity.
Mehta finds his shrink's theory "comical", until he
discovers a psychological tract called The Adjustment of the Blind,
which expands the idea. "The authors maintained that... the
sexual emphasis people place on the eyes in fact belongs to the
genital organs. They cited case histories of a boy who equated
his blindness with circumcision; a girl with a deep-seated fear
of sexual intercourse who imagined that her eyes would be penetrated
by needles... a woman who, aroused by looking at her father, gouged
her eyes out.
"Chevigny and Braverman maintained that myth and literature
underscored their views about the displacement to the eyes: the
whole body of the Hindu god Indra was covered with vulvae, which
later turned into eyes; the Egyptian god Ptah gave birth to other
gods through his eyes; the Greek demigoddess Gorgon, who is associated
with snakes and spiders—symbols of genitalia—also
had the power of the evil eye; the single large eye of Cyclops
in The Odyssey had been taken by some for the sexual potency of
`the universal father'..."
Goodness. Can this be why so few people mentioned the former
Home Secretary's disability during his rise to power?
Ved Mehta takes
no responsibility for and makes no claim of accuracy for any information
on this Web site that is not directly written by him. |
