Perversion the Social Relation

Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite 145If it is in fact the case, as he appears so passionately to believe, thatGilles can be forgiven for even these truly despicable crimes, then surelythe light of grace will shine at least as brightly on the "everyday " sinnersof which the crowd was constituted. In his classic essay Group Psychologyand the Analysis of the Ego, Freud details the relationship betweenthe type of empathie identification forming the basis of the transferenceof the trial audience and the vicissitudes of the subject's moral life: itsrelation, in other words, to the superegoic vectors of conscience, of internalizedself-surveillance and judgment. In the context of his analysisof the logic of group formation Freud first defines identification as "theearliest expression of an emotional tie with another person,'* 25 then contraststhe identificatory phenomenon with a libidinal object cathexis,suggesting that we identify with the other as an alternative to taking thisother as a sexual object. Here it becomes apparent how the audience'sidentification served to desexualize its spectatorial position with respectto Gilles, said to repress in the process any libidinal investment it mayhave had in Gilles's dangerous and transgressive sexuality. For this reasonit is possible to qualify the crowd's reaction to Gilles's confessionas defensive. In order to avoid the interrogation of its own fascinationwith Gilles's criminality, the audience transforms the accused's rhetoricof innocence into the perspective from which it can view itself as beyondmoral reproach.More crucially, however, Freud also shows in this same essay howidentification subtends a kind of egoic sympatico in which the subject,in this case the collective subject constituted by the trial's auditors,"moulds" its ego "after the fashion of the one that has been taken asmodel" (106). Through this process Gilles's public manages to reconstructitself on the model of the criminal's noumenal innocence, in sodoing constituting itself as a "group" in the Freudian sense of the termby consolidating itself, so to speak, from the point of view of Gilles'sguiltless enunciation, all the while deriving the dividend in jouissancein the sharing of Gilles's guilty transgressions. It is also tremendouslysignificant to the case of Gilles de Rais that Freud relates the selectionby a group of an ego ideal through the identificatory act to what hecalls "self-observation, the moral conscience," and "the censorship ofdreams." Its identification with Gilles permitted a part of the audience'scollective ego to "cut itself off from the rest of the ego," thereby allowingthe simultaneous coexistence of the reassuring, conscious narcissis-