Perversion the Social Relation

"IKltOWOctave MannoniTranslated by G. M. GoshgarianAs soon as we begin to attend to the psychological problems thrown upby beliefs, we discover that they cover a very broad range of experienceand display rather close similarities across the most widely divergentdomains. Because these problems remain unsolved, we are not only unableto say with certainty what a sixteenth-century humanist—Rabelais,for instance—did or did not believe, but are not much better off whenit comes to assessing our contemporaries' ambivalent belief in superstitions.The ethnographers cite astonishing statements by their informants,who assure them that people used to believe in masks in the olddays; but these ethnographers do not always clearly tell us just what haschanged since, as if the change in question could be chalked up, as itwere, to the steady spread of enlightenment. It is a fairly safe bet that abelief of this sort has always been associated with the old days; but wewould like to know why. A person watching a magician perform doesnot for an instant believe that his tricks are magic, yet she insists that theillusion be "perfect." We would be hard put to say who is supposed to befooled. Something similar occurs in the theater—is, indeed, so much apart of the theater that playwrights have devised "induction scenes," asin The Taming of the Shrew, or imagined little fables about naive, gulliblespectators who take what happens on the stage for real life. These arerun-of-the-mill examples of the problem of belief; others, as we shallsee, are more surprising.Psychoanalysis, which encounters problems of belief every day, has