A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

abductee reports that during her experience—which involved observing “a ‘man’ and a ‘horse’
engage in sexual contact” and being anally penetrated by an alien figure—“she was given to
believe…that the aliens were carefully monitoring her feelings of shame, guilt and
humiliation.” 310
The sense of shame as central to the abduction scenario is also attested to by the
centrality of the genitals, and later anus, to the abduction narrative. This focus on two classical
loci of Freudian drives offers yet another suggestive link between abduction and psychoanalysis.
Abduction constitutes an exposure to what Lacan refers to as the Real—“the realm of raw,
unrepresentable fullness prior to the organization of the drives.” 311
Given that the anal and
genital are two primary seats of that very organization, their shameful and terrifying recurrence
in the abduction scenario points to an encounter that reverberates at the most basic levels of
being.
The account offered by Lacan to describe what he means by the Gaze does not hinge
upon the subject being cast into opacity by entering into the field of vision of another subject. In
Lacan’s account, it is not another human being that casts his own position of mastery into
doubt— it is a sardine can. As recounted in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
Lacan was in Brittany, out to sea with local fishermen. Referring to a sardine can floating
nearby, one of the men exclaimed, “You see that can? Do you see it? Well it doesn't see you!”
312 Lacan believed that, in some ways, the man’s statement was fundamentally untrue—that the
object does stare back. Lacan’s insight was basically that to see the can as “sardine can” or even
as “can” or “container” or “metal” was to “see” it through a semiotic veil. This moment of
clarity experientially revealed to Lacan the gap between the physiology of vision and the socially
310 David M. Jacobs, “Subsequent Procedures” in Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study
Conference, ed. Pritchard et al. (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Press, 1994) 65.
311 Jay, 350.
312 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis (New York: W.W.Norton, 1978) 95.
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