Independent (London)
December 30, 2004
Steamy Sights for Poor Eyes
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?
