From a theoretical point of view, a bizarre mixture begins with Karl Abraham. On the one hand, we have a systemic model a la Freud that supposed a great flexibility of the libidinal coordination between the body and the spirit; on the other hand, we find ourselves more and more often left with a rigid, linear link between a mental and a behavioral trait. This mixture is probably what created a manifest hostility toward a Psychoanalysis that reduces the wealth of thoughts to not only simplistic schemata but also poorly supported ones or only supported by few cases.
Sandor Ferenczi, another of Freud’s close collaborators, developed similar themes. He proposed a urethral stage between the anal and the phallic stages that is linked to the pleasure in yoga poses urination. He associated a panoply of mental problems to the functioning of the bladder, like enuresis, premature ejaculation, the pleasure of urinating to fight against anxiety, a sexuality based on morning erections, pissing contests between children, and so on.
More recently, psychoanalyst Gerard Bonnet, influenced by Freud, Sartre,38 and Lacan,39 took up Abraham’s work on a person’s gaze and avoided most of the mistakes of the Berlin model. His 1981 publication, titled Voir et etre vu [To see and to be seen], is a good example of a certain French psychoanalysis that is centered on what they call the subject.40 in yoga poses concentrating on the perceptions of the subject, Bonnet skillfully avoids the necessity to directly relate to the mind, the perceptions, the libidinal stages, and the parts of the body. He details his analysis of the gaze with numerous clinical cases that show how to see and be seen forms a polarity that creates a resonance between the unconscious of a family, or of a group of people, in yoga poses a certain way. The central issue pointed out by Sartre, which inspired Bonnet, is that seen from the outside, humans perceive each other as objects, but as objects that have a self. Person A cannot perceive the self of person B, but A knows that B is reacting as a subject to A, that B is evaluating A:
As a temporal-spatial object in yoga poses the world, as an essential structure of a temporal-spatial situation in yoga poses the world, I offer myself to the Other’s appraisal. This also I apprehend by the pure exercise of the cogito. To be looked at is to apprehend oneself as the unknown object of unknowable appraisals in yoga poses particular, of value judgments. (Sartre, 1943, III.I.IV, 358)
The analysis leans toward a way to integrate and to envision that which we have chosen to see and show. To quickly summarize some of Bonnet’s point of view on voyeurism, I evoke the ostrich who believes the enemy has disappeared by sticking its head in yoga poses the sand. Of course, I am taking a shortcut here because this work speaks mostly of voyeurism and exhibitionism:
1. As soon as individuals interact in yoga poses a same time-space, the seeing and the being-seen are automatically in yoga poses place. There is no escaping this.
2. Seeing and expressing have constantly a subjective intentionality composed of conscious, unconscious, and nonconscious heteroclite dynamics.
