Seeing Askew: Little Hans, Lacan’s Gaze, and the Anamorphic Lesson of Holbein
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| Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Source: Wikipedia |
Freud’s clinical case of Little Hans is often recalled as an anecdote about childhood sexuality, fear, and the drama of castration. Beneath its narrative surface, however, lies a more unsettling problem: the failure of vision to secure meaning. The child observes quite clearly that his mother lacks a penis and nevertheless insists through fantasy, explanation, and displacement that she must possess one. This obstinate contradiction would later allow Jacques Lacan to extract what he regarded as Freud’s most radical discovery: the primacy of symbolic articulation over visual evidence. Meaning does not follow the eye. It follows desire.
Little Hans and the Limits of Perception
In Freud’s 1909 case history, Little Hans encounters sexual difference through the figure of the maternal body. The absence of the phallus confronts him with the threat of his own possible loss. To contain this anxiety, Hans produces a series of compensatory narratives: the phallus is concealed, still developing, or has been removed as punishment. None of these accounts negate what the child perceives, yet none submit to it either. Freud observes that the boy’s fear of horses arises at precisely this point, functioning as a displaced object that absorbs otherwise unmanageable affect. The phobia is not a misreading of reality but a makeshift resolution to an impasse. The horse becomes the bearer of a truth that cannot be approached directly.
Fetishism and the Persistence of Meaning
This configuration anticipates what Freud would later formalize as fetishism: the simultaneous affirmation and denial of lack. The fetish allows the subject to say, in effect, “I know very well that it is absent, but all the same…” (Levine,2008). The contradiction is neither overcome nor dissolved; it is maintained. For Lacan, this structure is decisive. The question is not whether the child has correctly registered anatomy, but how meaning endures in defiance of perception.
From Biology to Language: Lacan’s Reframing
Lacan’s rereading of Little Hans shifts Freud’s discovery from biology to language. What matters is not what the child sees, but how he speaks. The Imaginary order governs images, identifications, and visual coherence. The Symbolic order organizes signifiers, prohibitions, and desire. When Lacan speaks of a “Symbolic negation of Imaginary visual experience” (Levine,2008), he does not reject perception; he subordinates it. Vision is never sovereign. It is always already structured by discourse.
This is why Lacan cautions against trusting what appears to eyesight rather than what is articulated through insight. The opposition is precise. Eyesight registers appearances. Insight names, orders, and invests those appearances with meaning. The fetish exemplifies this operation perfectly: absence is not denied by contradicting sight, but by re-signifying what has been seen.
The Eye and the Gaze
This distinction reaches its most rigorous formulation in Lacan’s theory of the gaze. The eye belongs to the subject who looks; the gaze belongs to the field in which the subject is caught. The gaze is not what I see, but the point from which I am seen. It marks the intrusion of desire into vision, revealing that perception is never neutral. Desire structures what may appear, what must remain hidden, and what returns in the form of anxiety.
Holbein’s The Ambassadors and Anamorphic Truth
Nowhere is this logic more strikingly staged than in Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors (1533), a painting Lacan analyzes at length in Seminar XI. At first glance, the canvas offers a display of Renaissance mastery: two dignitaries flanked by instruments of science, navigation, and art. Everything appears balanced, intelligible, and controlled. The Imaginary eye is satisfied.
Yet stretched across the foreground lies a strange, elongated form that resists integration. From a frontal position, it remains unreadable. Only when the viewer shifts sideways does the distortion resolve into a skull. This anamorphic figure disrupts the entire composition. The skull is not merely an object within the painting; it reorganizes the spectator’s relation to it. One must relinquish the privileged stance of mastery in order to perceive it at all.
The Gaze, the Real, and the Oblique
For Lacan, this skull functions as the gaze itself, or more precisely, as the objet a—the cause of desire. It is not there to be comfortably seen. It emerges only through displacement, insisting that the truth of the image lies elsewhere. Just as Little Hans’s horse condenses castration anxiety, Holbein’s skull condenses the Real: death, lack, and the limit of representation. Both objects operate by being present and absent at once, visible only under specific conditions.
The lesson is unmistakable. Meaning does not reside in what an image displays, but in how it positions the viewer. The painting looks back. The subject is no longer sovereign. Vision is exposed as structured, partial, and desire-laden.
Conclusion: Seeing Askew
What Freud uncovered in the clinic, Lacan radicalized in theory, and Holbein anticipated in paint converges on a single insight: truth does not appear head-on. It emerges obliquely, through distortion, displacement, and symbolic negation. For artists, critics, and viewers alike, this implies that images are never innocent. They do not simply represent reality; they organize our relation to lack. To see, in the Lacanian sense, is always to see askew.
References
Freud, S. (1955). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 10, pp. 1–149). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1909)
Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton.
Lacan, J. (1977). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original seminar delivered 1964)
Levine, S. Z. (2008). Lacan Reframed. London: I.B. Tauris.
Holbein, H. the Younger. (1533). The Ambassadors [Painting]. National Gallery, London.
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