Guilherme Massara Rocha: The Secret of Her Eyes – Necessity and Contingency in a Fragment of a Psychoanalytical Treatment

Guilherme Massara Rocha will present a fragment from a single case study from a Lacanian perspective on his work with a patient facing congenital blindness. When we lose the eye as the phallus that guarantees the consistency of the visual, the blindness that ensues is not simply a non-signifying darkness, but rather an ‘undifferentiated palate of images.’ The event of an ocular castration gives way to a seething imaginary without the security of a local iconography, and in the desperate attempt to arrest this imaginary deluge a ‘volcanic hunger’ is invoked for the final form of the dead body. In facing the faceless terror of a treacherous cadaver that violently sees me, a transformation can begin to unfold whereby the punishing gaze of the absolute other gives way to the voice of an other who asks ‘what do you want?’, and finally to a desire that neither sees nor is seen, that is free to touch the limit of the visual in a place where nobody is looking.

Guilherme Massara Rocha is psychoanalyst and professor of the Psychology Department of Federal University of Minas Gerais/Brazil. Graduated in psychology, he did his Master in Philosophy (epistemology of psychoanalysis) and his PhD in Philosophy (Aesthetics and ethics of psychoanalysis) at University of São Paulo/USP. He’s member of ISSP (International Society of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis) and of FEDEPSY (European Federation of Psychoanalysis). His psychoanalytical formation has been made mostly in Brazil (courses, seminars and clinical sessions in lacanian institutions), as well as his personal analysis. He has also experienced short stages in France, mostly during his PhD (Université Paris VII, Association Mondiale de Psychanalyse). His most recent publications in English are:

ROCHA, G. M. The Unconscious: Ideal Worker? International Forum of Psychoanalysis, v. 21, p. 17-21, 2012.

ROCHA, G. M. Man in Progress. In: Agnès Monplaisir; Magali Deboth; Victoria Mirzayantz; Daniel Saint-Aubyn. (Org.). Daniel Hourdé – Man in Progress. [http://www.agnesmonplaisir.com/catalogue_dh.html]