José R. Ubieto is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst
This summer has had, in addition to the heat and political uncertainty, three public protagonists: Luis Rubiales, Rosa Peral and Daniel Sancho. In all of them, morbidity has been a constant linked to sex and in the last two also to death. The obscene (that which should be off the scene) has been made public and has fueled the curiosity of millions of citizens. Why are we so interested in things related to sex and even more so if it is linked to death? Is it just, also, a question of marketing: morbidity sells?
Freud first - just after the appearance of the cinema - and then in more detail Lacan showed us how we enjoy looking (scopic drive) because in that look we capture the world as a spectacle that surrounds us. To such an extent that we end up victims of a decoy, as happens to regular users of social networks: they believe they desire because they see themselves, accumulating likes and followers, as desired subjects and they do not realize that what the Other wants to extract from them It's his look. The voyeuristic hunter of intimate images ends up hunted by that enveloping gaze. Who watches who on reality shows and trash TV shows: the viewers or the participants?
Sex and death add extra enjoyment because they show openly what should remain hidden because it is immodest. Both topics are eternal because we have a definitive explanation for neither of them. We always lack the words to create a convincing story and that absence generates anguish. Scrutinizing them through the protagonists of other people's stories relieves us, by allowing us to explore possible answers, leaving us safe from the barrier of the screen.
On the other hand, the incessant repetition of these scenes and their details (thousands of images of each case in the media), provides us with sadistic enjoyment - not admitted because we are unconscious - of the misfortune of others. The gaze and cruelty are the two most precocious instinctual tendencies of the human being. If in other times, making people suffer was a more common practice, today that is veiled and displaced to the more acceptable satisfaction of seeing others suffer. Hence our reaction to these events always takes a two-way approach: fascinated by the scene we are watching and horrified by the event that occurred.
