2. Before the Milk of the Word:
Nipple-Eyes
o o
~
--anon.
Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1808 (detail)
"At their mother's moist'ned eyes babes shall suck," says the Shakespeare's Duke of Bedford fifty lines into the First Part of Henry the Sixth. Foreseeing the posterity of wretched years now to follow on the death of the king, Bedford adds, developing the image, that England shall "be made a nourish of salt tears." Implicit here is the metaphor of eye for nipple, face for breast first studied by Dr. Renato Almansi in an essay on "The Face-Breast Equation" published in 1960. Almansi's article builds in turn on earlier research which calls first for review.
In 1938 the Viennese analyst Otto Isakower published his classic paper entitled "A Contribution to the Patho-Psychology of Phenomena Associated with Falling Asleep" describing what has come to be termed "the Isakower phenomenon." As described by a later researcher, this hypnogogic event
is characteristically remembered or re-experienced by the individual as the visual sensation of a large, doughy, shadowy mass, usually round, growing larger as it comes nearer and nearer to his face, swelling to a gigantic size and threatening to crush him, and then gradually growing smaller and moving further away. Often there is an indistinct perception of a purplish shape like the nipple area of the breast. The approaching mass slowly seems to become a part of him, obscuring the boundaries between his body and the outside world, and blurring his sense of self more and more. All of this is typically accompanied by sensations of tactile roughness on the skin and inside the mouth, and a milky or salty taste in the back of the throat. Often there are feelings of floating or loss of equilibrium. In some individuals there is, interestingly, a memory of voluntarily producing the experience or prolonging it. (Bromberg 600-1)
Isakower argues along Freudian lines that "[w]hen we fall asleep, the ego withdraws its interest and its cathexes [investments] from the external world" (336). This gradual withdrawal permits the "revival of very early ego-attitudes," and Isakower contends that the phenomena he reports represent imprints from "mental images of sucking at the mother's breast and of falling asleep there when satisfied" (341). H.D., whose pre- oedipal concern was noted in the previous chapter, offers a possible analogue to the phenomenon in the seemingly hallucinatory experience she described to Freud as "the transcendental feeling of the two globes or the two transparent half-globes enclosing me"-- Isakower's paper not having yet appeared, Freud evidently acquiesced to the poet's supposition that she had gotten back to the womb in "some form of pre- natal fantasy" (168).
Bertram Lewin, in a series of papers dating from 1946 to 1953, discussed the Isakower phemenonon in relation to what he called "the dream screen" and also "the class of blank dreams." For Lewin, "the dream screen" constitutes one visual element in the Isakower conglomeration of relatively formless visual and nonvisual hallucinations. As the name suggests, Lewin's "dream screen" constitutes the background on which the dream projects its imaging: "[i]t is flat, or virtually so, like the surface of the earth, for it is genetically a segment of the baby's vast picture of the mammary hemisphere" (197-98). Lewin's third category, the class of blank dreams,
consists of various subgroups, having in common an absence or near absence of formed, manifest, visual detail and plot. They may be simple, visually manifest blanks, or they may be composites of various features of the Isakower phenomena, or they may be blended with later impressions. They are often not describable in concrete terms but only by means of metaphor, and they may resemble feelings and affects rather than pictures. (198)
Lewin concluded that "[g]enetically, Isakower phenomena, dream screen, and blank dreams are in essence the same thing; they reproduce some of the impression that the smallest baby has at the breast" (198).
The gifted clinician and theorist René‚ Spitz responded to the "extraordinary fertile" work of Lewin and Isakower in his 1955 study of "the genesis of perception and its role for psychoanalytic theory," "The Primal Cavity." Spitz's detailed direct observations on infants had led him to conclude "that the [infant's] first visual percept is the human face," or, more exactly, "a Gestalt configuration within the human face" (216). He makes the crucial point that
The nursing baby does not look at the breast. He does not look at the breast when the mother is approaching him, nor when she is offering him the breast, nor when he is nursing. He stares unwaveringly, from the beginning of the feeding to the end of it, at the mother's face. (218)Spitz thus proposes that "the Isakower phenomenon does not represent the approaching breast" but "the visually perceived human face" (218).
For the infant,
nursing and staring at the same time, "breast and face are
experienced as one and indivisible" (219), and the
concomitant tactile sensations in the oral cavity are
united with visual perceptions into one
undifferentiated unity, "in which any one part of the
experience comes to stand for the total experience"
(222; see fig. 1). Given his sense of the infant's
developmental program, Spitz characterizes the Isakower
phenomenon and the dream screen as two stages of
regression. The dream screen he imagines to go to the
level of the memory traces "laid down somewhere
between" the ages of six months and one year, while the
Isakower phenomenon "harks back to a [still] earlier
period, that precedes the reliable laying down of
visual mnemic traces" (232). These regressions are
thus presented as the counterpart to the ontogenetic
development of perception via the mouth as the primal
cavity where--anticipating Julia Kristeva's more recent
conception of the "chora"--"[t]he earliest sensory
experiences ... are dealt with on the level of the
primary process, yet they lead to the development of
the secondary process" (238). So for Spitz
the dream screen is not the visual image of the breast, but much
more probably "the result of a composite experience,
which in the visual field represents the approaching
face of the mother, but in the field of the other
percepts involves the sensations within the oral
cavity" (232). "This," he adds, "is perhaps
also an explanation of the fact that in so many of the dream
screen reports the dream screen appears dark, at other
times colorless, amorphous." What Lewin sees as "a
blending of different images of the breast," Spitz
labels "a synesthesia of many different senses, the
visual constituent of which is derived from the percept
of the face" (233). In the condensation of the face
with the breast image, it is, fascinatingly enough in
this hypothesis, the image of the face which is most
repressed.
Spitz's observations are amply confirmed by contemporary researchers who have repeatedly established, as Michael Carroll summarizes, that an infant of two to four months will fixate more upon the eyes than upon any other facial feature. Of the several explanations offered for this effect, "the most common is that the preference for `eyes' derives from a set of more general visual preferences that characterize the infant at this age"--including preferences for curvilinearity, concentricity, and contrast-density (Carroll 183). Hence early infants prefer "bull's eye" patterns over other graphic designs, a finding with noticeable impact on the latest generation of mobiles for babies. The physical similarity of eye and nipple appears in the word "areola," by which English refers both to the concentric and pigmented iris of the eye and to the pigmented area surrounding the nipple. If we grant that young infants fixate upon the eyes because of a generalized preference for certain physical characteristics, concludes Carroll, then it follows that they "would fixate upon the tip of the mother's breast for the same reasons, since the tip of the breast manifests these same traits" (184).
Renato Almansi's attention to "the face-breast equation" was prepared by earlier work on the hypnagogic phenomenon of a scopophilic and orally oriented patient in whom "intense frustration and anger toward the mother figure had come to the fore":
The visual components of this phenomenon appeared to result from the fusion of two percepts: the image of a face, which was identified as loving and inviting at times and as angry and forbidding at other times; and the image of the breast, which had probably been perceived at a later stage of development. In this patient, the latter image, i.e., the breast, screened the former almost completely; only through the patient's numerous associations and his statement that a voice emerged from inside of a breastlike cloud was it possible to ascertain that, in effect, the breast concealed the percept of a face. (43-44)This clinical example, and the theoretical concepts behind it, encourage Almansi to speculate that the fusion of the two percepts of breast and face, the screening of one by the other, and their equation may occur more frequently than is commonly realized.
In "The Face-Breast Equation," he offers several additional clinical examples. The first concerns an ophthalmologist, the eldest of eight children, whose mother weaned his siblings by painting her nipples with a mixture of vinegar and charcoal in order to bring about revulsion in the child. His presenting symptoms included the fact that "[w]hen he operated on a patient's eye with the assistance of a female attendant, he was under tremendous tension, which he attributed to the fear that his hand might slip and that he might thrust the knife forcefully into the patient's orbit." Speculating as to "why this symptom was present only in the presence of his nurse, ... he realized that while he had only been consciously aware of his wish to fondle her breasts, actually he felt strong aggressive impulses against her" (45).
Another of Almansi's examples is a lawyer in his middle thirties who also revealed "strong, latent aggressive impulses, which were directed against the women in his family, and frequently against his female clients as well." When a termination was set, this patient began obsessively doodling naked female figures, as in the examples Almansi reproduces (fig. 2) with the comment,
At times, he elaborated on these figures by adding a semicircle to the semicircle representing the breasts, which transformed them into complete circles; he would then draw a line, joining the two circles to make a pair of glasses, and would shade the area between the breasts to make it look like a nose. Occasionally, in his drawings, the patient would enlarge the navel, to give it the appearance of a mouth. Thus, finally, he completed his representation of a face. (46-47)
The resolution of some of the patient's most obstinate
residual problems came one day when, after several
weeks of this activity, during an analytic session he
drifted into a hypnagogic state in which he visualized
with great clarity the dark, benevolent eyes of his
mother, isolated and suspended in space, looking down
upon him (47).
By way of illustration here I include
an image of Odilon Redon's (fig. 3), the title of which
might be translated "On the horizon, the angel of
certitudes, and in the somber sky, a questioning gaze"
(from his 1882 lithograph album, "To Edgar
Poe".) The
patient's visualization can anticipate our later
discussion of Charlotte Brontë‰, whose Jane Eyre
receives her only vision of her dead mother when the
moon becomes that human form "inclining a glorious brow
earthward" which "gazed and gazed and gazed" on her
(281). This vision also prepares us for
the role of the moon in linking (like a satellite relay) the mom's
face and the mom's breast: for some, the moon is the
breast and the eye of night.
In addition to the case material, Almansi develops
the "face-breast equation" with graphic material,
including cartoons. In one of these (fig. 4) a small male figure looks at female breasts which in
turn regard him; the female figure has neither a nose nor
eyes--these being displaced downward--but her mouth is
indicated. 
Another 
cartoon, forty years later, shows the equation still a
graphic commonplace (fig. 4a), as does
an animated GIF image which recenlty appeared in an on-line
publication (fig. 4b).
Almansi also includes some findings from a
Sumerian temple studied by the archaeologist M. E. L.
Mallowan; dated at approximately the third millennium
B.C.E., it was "adorned with a frieze depicting a very
large eye; and many thousands of votive objects were
found inside" (61). These idols represent
the outline of a woman in which the eyes are situationed where the
breast ought to be, and Mallowan believes
that "the Eye-Idols are the abstract symbols of some divinity . .
. . who, if not the Mother Goddess herself, had the
same powers of reproduction and generative force"
(Mallowan 153) and which, at this site, for
some unknown reason, were expressed in the form of the
"magic eye." Some specimens (fig.5) present a cross
between "the naturalist form of eye-idol" and the
"spectacle-topped" variety (Mallowan 34-35), to produce
an idol which seems to equate eyes and nipples.
From all these data, Almansi concludes that "on a primitive perceptual level the face may be equated with the breasts, and that there is a particularly strong correlation between the nipples and the eyes." He notes that in all the cases he reports the phenomena involved "were indissolubly bound to the liberation of large amounts of aggression," specifically reactive to oral deprivation. This aggression he relates to repeated frustration experienced at the breast at about three months, when, at the same time, the infant as a result of its deprivation fuses the percepts of face and breast. The infant reacts to its frustration with the "hallucinatory projection of the satisfaction- giving object in an attempt to recreate, in part at least, the primitive perceptual cluster consisting of the sensation of the nipple in the mouth and the concurrent vision of the mother's face. The interruption of this cluster by the withdrawal of the nipple is a powerful determinant in the differentiation between the `I' and the `non-I,' in the division between what is experienced internally and what is seen as external" (68). Almansi suggests that phenomena he describes "relate precisely to a period when the dividing line between the `I' and `non-I' was still not sharply drawn." The "`looking and being looked at' motif" expressed in the cartoons and in many of his clinical cases pertains to such a lack of differentiation and embodies dynamics both of identification and projection. Almansi's formulations correlate significantly with Melanie Klein's conceptualization of the infant's early object- relations and her sense that it is precisely during this same period between the second and fourth month that the infant moves from what she terms the "paranoid-schizoid" position to a depressive position fraught with ambivalent feelings toward the breast. Indeed, through a consideration of the crucial role Klein gives to envy, Michael Carroll's study of the psychological origins of the familiar folk belief in the evil eye argues that
the association between "eyes" and the "good breast," and the association between "envy" and the "good breast" are probably among the earliest of all the association formed in the mind of the human infant.That the adult's projection of the infantile memory of the good breast should become--through projection [of repressed hostility]--envy coming from the "eyes" of another individual, is therefore not at all surprising. (184).
Such dynamics are known to students of English Romanticism through a curious incident related by John William Polidori, who was serving as Byron's physician during the famous summer of 1816 which saw Byron, Shelley, and Mary Godwin meet at the Villa Diodati and undertake the ghost-story contest that resulted in Mary Godwin Shelley's Frankenstein (discussed in Chapter 4).
According to Polidori's eyewitness account, after midnight on June 18, 1816, "Byron repeated some verses of Coleridge's Christabel, of the witch's breast"--no doubt the climactic lines concerning "A sight to dream of, not to tell!"--"when..." But first, Christabel. Though never explicitly presenting the nipple-eye, the poem offers a telling embodiment of its thematic, combining as it does in the figure of Geraldine a crucial breast image ("the most important in the poem," as one critic says [Twitchell 47]) and a character whose "daemonic aggression resides in her eye" (Paglia 223). In the poem's unforgettable scene, Christabel watches as Geraldine
...unbound
The cincture from beneath her breast:
Her silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold! her bosom, and half her side--
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel! (248-54)
Earlier, while she was leading to her room the "lady strange" who had appeared suddenly from behind a "huge, broad-breasted, old oak-tree,"
... Christabel saw the lady's eye,
And nothing else saw she thereby,
Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall,
Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall.
(160-63, italics added)
The association of "boss" with bosom, or breast, appears in the OED's definitions for the word: "1. A protuberance or swelling on the body of an animal or plant; ... 3. A round prominence in hammered or carved work." (weblink; another) One might think as well of the conventional armor of Wagnerian Valkyries. Coleridge seems to play with the association through a verbal echo in the second part of the poem as Christabel, viewing "the joyous look" her father, Sir Leoline, receives from Geraldine, recalls the key scene of the preceding night, and
Again she saw that bosom old,
Again she felt that bosom cold (457-58).
"The touch of this bosom" has, however, left Christabel--like the author--unable to specify what Geraldine refers to as "This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow" (l. 270). This ancient mar in her(1) appears in part the projection of Christabel, who regresses, in simile, first to a child sleeping with her mother (l. 301) and then an infant (l. 318), all the while "Dreaming that alone, which is-- / O sorrow and shame!" (ll. 295-96), i.e. Geraldine's "mark of her sorrow" and "seal of her shame". For Coleridge, as for Freud, the unconscious knows not time, and
... neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been. (424-26)
To return to the early hours of June 18, 1816, and
Polidori's account: Byron repeated some verses of the
poem, "of the witch's breast, when silence ensued, and
Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to
his head, ran out of the room with a candle. ... He
was looking at Mrs. Shelley [i.e. Mary Godwin], and
suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had
eyes instead of nipples, which taking hold of his mind,
horrified him" (Holmes 329; fig. 6).
Mary Godwin, who even as a child had heard Christabel's author recite
his poetry at her home, reportedly knew firsthand that
"the horror
that Coleridge meant to attach to the Ladie in
Christabel was two eyes in her bosom" (Sunstein
112 and fn.) and no doubt shared this image with her lover, so
preparing the way for the hallucination of which she
herself was to be the victim. Already in
Alastor
Shelley had fused "That snowy breast, those dark and
drooping eyes" (l. 601), and in The Witch of
Atlas, the
appearance of "bosom-eyed" figures (l. 136), suggests a
familiarity with residual effects and affects of
unsuccessful early nurturing in a projected fearful
sense of parental reproach, the consequence of the
infant's anger and frustration over oral deprivation.(2).
One of the more striking images to be
generated out of surrealism, René‚ Magritte's Le Viol,
"The Rape,"
was produced in several versions and media between 1934
and 1948
(Google
some different versions)
The image was initially regarded as so
scandalous that in the 1934 surrealist Minotaur
exhibition in Brussels, it was hung in a private room
and shown only to initiates (Koslow 78),
though in
that same year André‚ Breton used Magritte's design for the
cover of his pamphlet, Qu'est-ce que le
surré‚alisme?
(fig. 7). It is perhaps an instance of the cunning or
unconscious of history, that in illustrating this
question with this image, these dedicated surrealists
are transposing a representation out of their cultural
archive--even an emblem of "Reason," as imagined in the
early years of the French Revolution (fig. 8).
Elizabeth Wright considers Magritte's image as "a
metaphor for [Lacan's sense of] any gaze, signifying
desire and an invasion of the other's desire (`The
Rape')" (118). Lacan identifies the gaze
as the "lodging of desire in looking," that is, an expression
of the subject's "search for a fantasy that represents
for him/her the lost phallus" (in Wright 117) or primal
object that can be, paradoxically enough given the
terminology, the mother. This dynamic appears already
in Wordsworth's Prelude, where the orphaned
poet,
himself fixated on "drinking in" external nature,
blesses "the infant Babe,"
Nurs'd in his Mother's arms, the Babe who sleeps
Upon his Mother's breast, who, when his soul
Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul,
Doth gather passion from his Mother's eye! (2.240-43 [1805])
The gaze, one might say, is an attempt to recover
or re-establish the lost object, the "object perdita"
that Lacan calls the "object petit a" which in
its
basic form would return us to the infant staring
"unwaveringly, from the beginning of the feeding to the
end of it, at the mother's face" (Spitz 218 [see babytalk cover in appendix, below]). As
Lacan puts it, "[t]he breast ... represents that part of
himself that the individual loses at birth, and which
may serve to symbolize the most profound lost object"
(in Silverman 156). Of course, no
reality
of the present can ever correspond to that infantile wish,
and, moreover, the equally unwavering desires of the
other must be reckoned with; so, for Lacan, pessimistically, "what I look at is never what I wish to
see"
(Concepts 103). By this account, for
example, our
enduring cultural fixation on the female breast (see,
e.g., Plath's Journals 22, below,
Chapter 9) might be
seen as a function of reluctance to enter the symbolic
order and acknowledge the I/eye of the other. This
rape or "seizure" of the subjectivity of the other also
represents the defensive move of a desire not to be
objectified by the gaze of the mother--the drive not to
be an other for those eyes peering deep into one's
self. Magritte, as an artist reordering the
intersection of the imaginary (or private) and symbolic
(or cultural) order, disturbs the narcissistic, regressive-tending gaze of the viewer with an image which
makes the viewer see "the ubiquity of the libidinous"
(Wright 118)--that is, the always scandalous
picture of
our ongoing infantile sexuality. 
Manuel Bravo
offers a different version of the surrealist conceit in his
photograph "Lucy" (fig. 9), a title which invokes the
patron saint of artists and sufferers from eye
afflictions who was standardly depicted in medieval
iconography with a tray bearing the eyes she tore out
to discourage a suitor who much admired them. Here,
the displaced eyes stand in for the viewer's, which, in
turn, meeting the gaze of her nipples, are as it were
taken from him or her and placed on the tray formed by
the borders of the photograph, there to rest
(arrested), seeking out the invisible beyond the frame.
Finally, J. E. Millais' 1851 painting "The
Return of the Dove to the Art" (also called "the Daughters of
Noah" or "The Wives of the Sons of Noah") shows this
gaze from the outside, as the dove doubles for an
exposed, proffered breast, complete with actual eyes to
meet those of its adorer (fig. 10).
These considerations may resonate with the
preceding chapter's conflicting approaches to the
"other" of the text. And it might be argued that even
as the dynamic guiding the chapters to come sets out to
"nipplize" the text in search of what the gospel calls
"the sincere milk of the word" (1 Peter 2:2), at the
same time the endeavor displaces the face of the text
with its own object/reflection/regard. However that
may be, the homonym, paromasia, pun can epitomize the
full word, full precisely with its flowing links to or
glances at or segues into other contexts, some of which
look back to where we start from ("home-nymic"
associations, perhaps), while others trace our destiny.
2. Barbara Gelpi reports Shelley's
"appalled
reaction" to his first wife's refusal to nurse their
infant, and comments that "he considered it enormously
significant either that his mother nursed him herself,
thus establishing him in his subjectivity--the nurse's
soul entering the child--or that she, like Harriet, did
not, and by this refusal made him all the more obsessed
with an ideal of the maternal that would
literally
fulfill him: fill him full" (91). In the
course of her study of Prometheus Unbound Gelpi quotes
two
passages in which "[t]he metaphor of breast-feeding,
with eyes displacing breasts, is obvious" (260).
Figures
1. Sergei Vasiliev, "In Maternity Home," 1988.
2. Doodlings of Dr. Almansi's patient. Renato J. Almansi, "The
Face-Breast Equation," Journal of the American Psycho-analytic
Association 8, no. 1 (1960).
3. Odilon Redon, "A l'horizon, l'ange des certitudes," from
A Edgar Poe, 1882.
4a. Mike Peters, Dayton Daily News; rpt. Atlanta Journal
and Constitution, September 28, 1997; D4.
4b. Mark Alan Stamaty, illustration accompanying a review of
The Blue Room in "Theater" section of Slate's
"Summary Judgment," posted Dec. 16, 1998.
5. M. E. L. Mallowan, "Excavations at Brak and Chaga
Bazar," Iraq 9 (1947), fig. 6, "Eye-Idol."
6. Aubrey Beardsley, Salome, detail.
7. René Magritte, cover to André Breton,
Qu'est-ce que le surréalism?, 1934.
8. Reason, from Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
9. Manuel Bravo, "Lucy."Witkin Gallery.
10. J. E. Millais, "The Return of the Dove to the Ark,"
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
________________________________________________________
Chapter 2 -- Notes
detail from jacket of Benjamin Walker, Sex and the Supernatural.
Appendix: additional examples
Athens [Ga.] Daily News, 19 April 2000, p. B1
New York Times Magazine, [date not yet available]
logo for Hooters of America, Inc.
poster for Lysistrata; Shoestring Players, Univ. of South Carolina, Spartanburg, April 2004
Sutt soonas sett they were, her uyes as his auroholes." Joyce,
Finnegans
Wake, 241.11-12.
________________________________________________________
Tex Avery wolf 
August 2006
from YouTube video "Wierd Al Everything You Know Is
Wrong / This is Another Crappy Productions By Robby" (at 1.19 min.) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWIb0nY9_Sg)