Freud's Objects
The Lacanian Review "Introduction to Freud" Issue 17 Summer 2025
Statuette of a kneeling figure is a 1930s Balinese Panggal Buaya wood carving, 26.7 x 6.5 x 10 cm, one of fifty-one objects featured on the Freud Museum London website, an iota of Freud’s extensive collection of more than two thousand antiquities.
Why this object? Look closely to note what is rendered from the wood as described on the museum website, “a woman meditating [. . .] being tempted or haunted by myriads of poisonous creatures (snakes, scorpions and spiders) and evil spirits. […] shown as the ‘hand’ and ‘limb’ of the dwellers of the underworld.”1 A rattle snake loops around her, over an arm and up her back, the interlocking hollow keratinous scales of its tail held in her hands; a scorpion lies on her lap, pedipalps encircle her genitalia, tail raised, metasoma upholds her hands; a spider seizes her chest, chelicerae at her throat, opisthosoma, which contain the spinnerets, protruding as an appendage or externalized cardiac-like organ; a human hand restrains her right shoulder, distends upwards and terminates in a lewd neotragus pygmaeus; a human foot mounts her left shoulder, its leg rises into a snarling reptilian grotesquerie; and what Anura amphibian adorns her head? This is not all. One remaining explicit, incongruous and uncanny element, an oddly familiar figure, hovering directly above her, the balding severed head of a mocking libidinous man, who, unlike the other tongued vertebrates vying over her, can speak.
Yet the woman is impervious to these creature-beings drawn to her, gazing downward as described by the museum in mediation. If so or not, otherwise preoccupied, she is elsewhere . . .
This knotted carving, and my inexhaustible litany that fails to capture its meaning, is “directed to the real that excludes any type of sense.”2
1. https://www.freud.org.uk/collections/objects/3084/.
2. Jacques Lacan, “L’insu que sait de l’une-bevue s’aile a mourre” (March 8, 1977), quoted in Jacques-Alain Miller “The Seminar of Barcelona: On Die Wege des Symptombildung” [On the Pathways to Symptom Formation], Psychoanalytical Notebooks 1 (1998), pp. 11-65, quoted in Susana Huler's "Presentation of the Theme of the London Workshop 2023-24," https://londonworkshop-freudianfield.com/theme-2023-2024/ accessed June 30, 2025
Why this object? Look closely to note what is rendered from the wood as described on the museum website, “a woman meditating [. . .] being tempted or haunted by myriads of poisonous creatures (snakes, scorpions and spiders) and evil spirits. […] shown as the ‘hand’ and ‘limb’ of the dwellers of the underworld.”1 A rattle snake loops around her, over an arm and up her back, the interlocking hollow keratinous scales of its tail held in her hands; a scorpion lies on her lap, pedipalps encircle her genitalia, tail raised, metasoma upholds her hands; a spider seizes her chest, chelicerae at her throat, opisthosoma, which contain the spinnerets, protruding as an appendage or externalized cardiac-like organ; a human hand restrains her right shoulder, distends upwards and terminates in a lewd neotragus pygmaeus; a human foot mounts her left shoulder, its leg rises into a snarling reptilian grotesquerie; and what Anura amphibian adorns her head? This is not all. One remaining explicit, incongruous and uncanny element, an oddly familiar figure, hovering directly above her, the balding severed head of a mocking libidinous man, who, unlike the other tongued vertebrates vying over her, can speak.
Yet the woman is impervious to these creature-beings drawn to her, gazing downward as described by the museum in mediation. If so or not, otherwise preoccupied, she is elsewhere . . .
This knotted carving, and my inexhaustible litany that fails to capture its meaning, is “directed to the real that excludes any type of sense.”2
1. https://www.freud.org.uk/collections/objects/3084/.
2. Jacques Lacan, “L’insu que sait de l’une-bevue s’aile a mourre” (March 8, 1977), quoted in Jacques-Alain Miller “The Seminar of Barcelona: On Die Wege des Symptombildung” [On the Pathways to Symptom Formation], Psychoanalytical Notebooks 1 (1998), pp. 11-65, quoted in Susana Huler's "Presentation of the Theme of the London Workshop 2023-24," https://londonworkshop-freudianfield.com/theme-2023-2024/ accessed June 30, 2025
Robert Buck © 2025
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