In psychology and psychiatry, scopophilia or scoptophilia (Ancient Greek: σκοπέω skopeō, "look to", "to examine" + φῐλῐ́ᾱ philíā, "the tendency towards") is an aesthetic pleasure drawn from looking at an object or a person.
[1] As explained by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud used the term scopophilia to describe, analyze, and explain the concept of Schaulust, the pleasure in looking,[2] a curiosity which he considered a partial-instinct innate to the childhood process of forming a personality;[3] and that such a pleasure-instinct might be sublimated, either into Aesthetics, looking at objets d'art or sublimated into an obsessional neurosis "a burning and tormenting curiosity to see the female body", which afflicted the Rat Man patient of the psychoanalyst Freud.
[4] From that initial interpretation of Schaulust arose the psycho-medical belief that the inhibition of the scopic drive might lead to actual, physical illness, such as physiologic disturbances of vision and eyesight.
[12] Critical race theorists, such as bell hooks,[17] Shannon Winnubst,[18] and David Marriott[19] present and describe scopophilia and the scopic drive as the psychological and social mechanisms that realize the practices of Other-ing a person to exclude them from society (see also scopophobia).
In the 1970s, parting from Lacan's propositions, psychoanalysts of the cinema used the term scopophilia to identify and to describe the aesthetic and emotional pleasures (often pathological), and other unconscious mental processes that occur in the minds of spectators gazing at a film.