Beauty, the Death Drive, and the Sacred Feminine



In today’s world, bombarded by images of an unreachable ideal, a girl learns to build her identity not through her own experience but through an external, fantasized gaze. First the mother’s, then the screen’s, and finally that of the social Other as a whole. Beauty thus becomes the first language of recognition, the primordial signifier that answers the question, “Who am I?” Long before she understands life, the girl has learned the fundamental lesson: to be looked at is to exist.

This gaze is not neutral. Freud called it the ego ideal, the internalized pattern that guides the effort to be “loved.” Lacan, building on Freud’s ego, introduces the mirror stage and clarifies that there the primacy of the image and the viewpoint of the Other are instituted. Within that framework, love and desire become synonymous because both pass through the scene of recognition: to be loved is to be desired under the gaze of the Other. The daughter absorbs that gaze as the measure of her being. This is why the indifference of others is not experienced as mere disinterest, but as symbolic annihilation. A minimal gesture hurts like a wound because it throws her place in the world of desire into doubt and, with it, her very existence.

The narcissism that develops is not pathological, but structural. It is the armor needed to sustain an identity built on the shifting sands of being the object for the Other. It is a currency used to survive in a psychic economy where her value is always in someone else’s hands.

Thus, for many women, beauty is not lived as a gift but as an alienating task. An obligation to maintain the specular image through which they were recognized. Losing that image is not simply aging; it is risking symbolic disappearance. The fear, then, is not old age but the silence of the Other who no longer looks at her. The woman who compulsively looks in the mirror, and in the faces of others, is not trying to confirm her vanity, but her own existence.

Being a woman becomes a doubly heavy task. On one hand, the burden of an identity that never settles, since, as Lacan would say, woman does not exist as a universal signifier. On the other, the weight of embodying the sacred feminine, an ambivalent figure where holiness and sin coexist. This icon both blesses and condemns: it demands purity and desire, motherhood and availability, care and fascination. She is named the origin of life and, at the same time, made responsible for the fall. Culture elevates her as Madonna and suspects her as temptation. In this mixture of idealization and guilt, the female body becomes both altar and tribunal, bearer of the mandate to reproduce and the duty to atone. To inhabit that double mandate is almost impossible without fracture, because no concrete life can sustain a demand that asks to be at once source and sacrifice, loving presence and perfect object for the gaze of others.

The Shared Mirage: The Trap of Desire

There is no couple without two, and the man is not a free executioner but another captive of the same system. He too is hailed by the Ideal and programmed to chase an object of desire that is itself a phantasmatic construction. He desires “the beautiful woman,” an empty signifier that culture fills with images. Both become trapped in a dance of mirages: she strives to embody object a, the cause of desire, and he chases that shadow without understanding that what he desires is ultimately unattainable.

The social stage only dramatizes and amplifies this original wound. Groups of friends, often unconsciously, push each other toward the logic of being chosen. The party becomes the stage where value is tested. The kiss, the fling, function as symbolic receipts: “I am desired, therefore I exist.”

But in the emptiness of the morning, the truth emerges. They were looked at, yes, but not seen; touched, but not found. The woman who uses her beauty as bait is not seeking pleasure but sustaining the image that guarantees her existence for the Other. Her body is barely a surface at the service of someone else’s demand, while her voice, her question about being, remains suspended.

Thus the night of fun reveals its true face. It is not a search for enjoyment but the desire to disappear. It is the attempt to suspend the anguish of being upheld by the gaze of others, a gaze that never stops demanding compliance and norms. It is a desire for death, or as Freud would call it, the death drive, acting in its most cruel form: a symbolic suicide where the body does not die, but the image that had become unbearable to inhabit.

Yet this gesture does not liberate. What happens is only a change of character: the proper woman of the day is replaced by the overflowing woman of the night. One figure substitutes the other, but neither is born of her own desire. Both are responses to the same social demand: to embody a coherent object for someone else.

The woman destroys one image to take refuge in another, without yet reaching her own word. She dies as the ideal object and is reborn as the fallen object, but the desiring woman has not yet appeared.

The Silence of One’s Own Voice

The real threat is not sexual dissatisfaction that pushes the carnival of masks, but the inner silence when the applause fades. When beauty is the only learned language, a woman loses access to her own voice. She becomes skilled at attracting but clumsy at choosing from her own desire because she does not know what it is, obscured by countless external expectations. She fears motherhood because she associates it with the end of being an object of desire, and she fears solitude, or not being a mother, for falling outside social expectation. Time becomes an enemy. The mirror, a judge. Love, a transaction. The result is the exhaustion of being.

The Work of Separation: Being Born from the Word

To live as a subject means carrying out a separation that the logic of the mirror blocked. It is not a rejection of the mother or the world, but a symbolic separation: to withdraw from the gaze that defines her so that she can finally look for herself.

The question is not simply “What do I want?” because that what may still be an object dictated by the market, the family, or society. The truly subversive question is “From where do I want?” after accepting the irreparable void that constitutes us and from which no one escapes.

From the mirror of the Ideal? Or from the fertile emptiness of my own being, from my lack in being?

It is not a sudden awakening but an ethical return. A slow, deliberate movement to inhabit one’s own body not as image but as the seat of experience; to listen to one’s own voice before the world translates it into a cliché.

The free woman does not break the mirror. She simply stops living inside it. The gaze that once defined her loses its power to dictate her being.

The free woman does not break the mirror. She simply stops living inside it. The gaze that once defined her loses its power to dictate her being. And then a woman is born again from her word. She gives herself a proper name, turns upon herself to end up different, immune to the gaze.

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