Steven J. Willett wrote:
>Neither 'skeptophilia' nor 'skoptophilia' is a regular Greek word. I
>have no idea why Lewis coined his version, but I doubt he knew Freud.
>It's more likely that he simply joined two ready roots.
This is possible, but the way Lewis puts it ("what would now be called
'skeptophilia'") doesn't suggest that he's knowingly coining a term, but
rather alluding to a newly-modish one. Lewis may not have known Freud's work
well (and he was not, if I remember, fluent in German), but he was after all
a notoriously well-read man, and knew enough about Freud's theories to
parody them in *The Pilgrim's Regress* - that is, three years before the
*Allegory of Love*. I find in that phrase "what would now be called" a
distancing effect, a holding of the word at arm's length as it were, that
would more or less correspond to Lewis's attitude to Freud (i.e. a distaste
that falls short of outright dismissal).
My guess (as I wrote earlier) is that scopophilia/skopophilia is indeed the
term at the root of all this. Certainly it is used these days to denote
"obtaining sexual arousal and gratification by secretly observing others
engaged in sexual intercourse," which is exactly what Lewis seems to mean by
it. (I quote here from a handy Internet source, because the OED - even with
magnifying glass! - is no use here. I'd like to find the earliest reference
for this word in English, but Google confirms that it's in fairly common use
in this sense now.) If Stephen's guess about a mistransliteration is right
(an idea I find appealing), I can easily imagine a scenario where Lewis
sees, either in an English translation of Freud or else in the work of an
English follower of Freud, a reference to 'skoptophilia' and as a good
classicist 'corrects' it (consciously or unconsciously) to 'skeptophilia,'
being a near-miss that makes sense.
Charlie
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