Perversion the Social Relation

88 Octave Mannoniof the real. There can be no doubt that Verleugnung suffices to createthis magic. After all, what is more profoundly magical than the fetish?Giving it this name was itself a way of acknowledging this. To put it in astriking (perhaps too striking) phrase, I would say that what comes firstis not a belief in magic, but a magic of belief. Only by making this correctioncan we explain the patent links between the presence or absenceof the phallus (castration) and magic; for the first magical belief is thebelief that the maternal phallus exists all the same, and it remains themodel for all subsequent transformations of beliefs.We come now to the hardest and riskiest aspect of matters. The examplescited above were chosen to illustrate various types of structures;we ought to be able to provide a coherent account of them. The youngHopi, sure of the (non-magical) existence of the Katcinas, flies into a\ panic at the thought that it might be refuted by reality. He recovers bypreserving his belief at the cost of a transformation that makes it "magical";his people's institutions help him do so. For a psychoanalyst, thiscrisis is, without any doubt, the repetition of another, that connectedwith castration. In question here is the loss of something that will subsequentlybe recovered after undergoing transformation, in a processunderwritten by the authorities. The role played by the children's credulityis just as obvious; the deception is institutionalized. But Talayesvacan tell us the whole story in his autobiography, for nothing has beenwiped out by amnesia. Verleugnung continues to be irrational, but everythingtakes place out in the open.This particularly simple schema or model is not applicable to Casanova.Children's credulity no longer interests him, but the world is full ofcredulous people, of "fools"; they make it possible for him to escape the"idea whose superstitiousness took nothing from its power," in whichwe recognize a refusal of castration. Because of this refusal, magical beliefby itself fails to protect him. Quite the contrary: when he finds himselfin its grip for lack of a credulous victim—when his belief in magic,as it were, collapses back onto itself—he is overwhelmed by anguish; hissystem, as he puts it, "goes," and he is left defenseless. The structures ofhis belief and Talayesva's do not coincide, they cannot be superposed;there is a gap or lag between them.In the case of the Hopi, we were able to describe the very processof formation of magical thinking. All indications are that Casanova