Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud thought humans were all repressed, which amounts to being closed off from our true urges in an effort to maintain a functional society. If this repression were not in place, we might be tackling one another without warning in an effort to sexually or violently satisfy ourselves.

Freud identifies the conscious and the unconscious in terms of how the mind, or “psyche” functions. The conscious is apparent and perceivable to ourselves and to those around us, while the unconscious is hidden in the deepest recesses of our brains and must be sought after by specialized techniques, namely psychoanalysis.

The unconscious is the home of the “id,” or the unabated animal passions that stir from within. “The power of the id expresses the true purpose of the individual organism’s life.” (Lemert, 131) The id is made slave to the “ego,” or the rational and purposeful side of ourselves; the ego, “whose business it also is to discover the most favorable and least perilous method of obtaining satisfaction, taking the external world into account”(Lemert, 132). Storey mentions an analogy used by Freud where he compares the ego to a person and the id to a horse. The ego rides the id and helps to keep potentially unbridled energy in check.

If the ego were to let the id run wild, it might look like this:

Freud’s ego/id split makes sense for classifying the inner workings of an individual. The modern film example of a repressed individual letting his id run wild can be found in the movie Fight Club through the character of Tyler Durden.

“The long period of childhood, during which the growing human being lives in dependence on his parents, leaves behind it as a precipitate the formation in his ego of a special agency in which this parental influence is prolonged. It has received the name of super-ego.” (Lemert, 131) In other words, the super-ego is essentially an authority figure living in your head modeled after your parents. Jiminy Cricket acts as Pinocchio’s super-ego:

Freud does not limit the super-ego to the confines of an individual, but expands the notion to that of a collective: “It can be asserted that the community, too, evolves a super-ego under whose influence cultural development proceeds.” (Lemert, 149) The process “is based on the impression left behind by the personalities of great leaders - men of overwhelming force of mind or men in whom one of the human impulsions has found its strongest and purest, and therefore often its most one-sided expression.” (Lemert, 149) Freud goes on to say that these individuals are often abused during their lifetime, Jesus Christ being a prime example.

When we dream, Freud believes what occurs is “a compromise between wishes emanating from the id and censorship enacted by the ego…censorship occurs but wishes are expressed; that is, they are coded in an attempt to elude censorship” (Storey, 94). In considering and interpreting dreams, one must weigh “the latent dream thoughts (unconscious) and the manifest content (what the dreamer remembers dreaming)”(Storey, 94). From Frankenstein combinations of latent elements, to associative shape shifting of people into things, it becomes tricky to decipher meaning in dreams. As movie guys, we are fond of the opening sequence from the movie 8 ½ in which the main character, a movie director, finds himself trapped in a car and under the watchful gaze of those around him as he almost suffocates, barely escapes, only to become a kite flying in the air in the hands of his producer.

Freud’s all-famous “Oedipus Complex” is best understood once you know the premise of the play Oedipus Rex (or Oedipus the King) by Sophocles. “Oedipus kills his father (unaware that he is his father) and marries his mother (unaware that she is his mother)”(Storey, 97). Taking note of John Storey’s use of the word ‘unaware’ in his brief but effective retelling of the story shows how this complex happens unconsciously and unintentionally. With an Oedipus Complex, a male child desires his mother, sees his father as competition for her love, wants to kill the father as a result, can’t do it because a kid against a grown man just won’t work, sides with the father and realizes he’ll just have to find another woman down the road, and if he’s lucky, she’ll be just like his mom. Freud had an Oedipus complex worked out for girls where the situation stated above is repeated, except with the father in the place of the mother and vice versa (Storey, 97). This complex has always made sense to us. Then again, we are both men. Freud’s version of the Oedipus complex for women seems a little weak.

When analyzing texts using Freud’s psychoanalytical method, there are two approaches: “the first approach is author-centered, treating the text as the equivalent to an author’s dream”(Storey, 97). By this method, a reader can try to locate hidden meanings within a given text and essentially reveal the author’s secret desires and motivations. In watching movies and television shows, this technique is invaluable to both of us in our quest for meaning in everything we consume.

“The second approach is reader-centered, and…is concerned with how texts allow readers to symbolically play out desires and fantasies in the texts they read”(Storey, 98). By this method, a reader becomes complicit and involved in the content of a work and can analyze the effect that the work has upon him or her.

Jacques Lacan “seeks to anchor psychoanalysis firmly in culture rather than biology”(Storey, 101). Lacan locates in every individual an “endless quest in search of an imagined moment of plenitude [abundance]”(Storey, 101). What is sought after is termed “l’objet petit a,” and will never be obtained.

Lacan is perhaps best known for his concept of the “mirror stage,” when a child first sees itself in a mirror and recognizes what it is and what it can be. “This form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone”(Lemert, 344). In other words, this event sets up the formation of the ego wherein the child begins to see itself as someone who looks and is looked upon. The image of itself that the child perceives in the mirror amounts to a “misrecognition” because of the division that occurs. Once the mirror stage has occurred, an individual enters the realm of the “Imaginary” and begins to identify with objects around it. “All our acts of identification are always acts of misidentification; it is never our selves that we recognize but only ever another potential image of our selves”(Lemert, 102). If you imagine the movie screen as a gigantic mirror in which we watch idealized versions of ourselves, you will begin to understand the impact Lacan’s thought has had on cinematic analysis.

Lacan’s conception of the “fort-da-game” surrounds the “alienating split between being and meaning; before language we had only being (a self-complete nature), after language we are both object and subject: this is made manifest every time I think (subject) about myself (object)”(Lemert, 103). Language becomes a symbolic way of representing the world and ourselves, and in turn, the way we lose and rediscover ourselves with every word we utter.

The Oedipus Complex, for Lacan, is a phase that solidifies the concept of otherness felt by an individual. Beginning with the separation from the mother and the impossibility of returning to her womb, we begin our endless search for something that is somehow equivalent to that ultimate desire, the closing of the gap between you and the other. And it will never be found. John Storey dashes the commonly held “ideology of romantic love – in which ‘love’ is the ultimate solution to all our problems”(Storey, 104). What a jerk.

Laura Mulvey is a seminal figure in the understanding of how women are portrayed and perceived in cinema. With her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” she hones in on “the male gaze,” which occurs in three ways: from the gaze of male characters looking at the women within a given movie, from the gaze of the camera filming the women, and finally the gaze of the audience watching the movie. “The inscription of the image of woman in this system is twofold: she is the object of male desire and she is the signifier of the threat of castration”(Storey, 105).

By way of her famous article, Mulvey seeks to destroy particular pleasures in the cinematic experience. “First, there is scopophilia, the pleasure of looking”(Storey, 105). Scopophilia has an inherent controlling and objectifying aspect to cinema that Mulvey considers addictive and dangerous. Another pleasure that Mulvey believes must be destroyed is the promotion of narcissism in the cinema. “Just as a child recognizes and misrecognizes itself in the mirror, the spectator recognizes and misrecognizes itself on the screen”(Storey, 105). When we identify with the main character of a movie, we are engaging narcissism. This kind of identification becomes dangerous when we enforce behavior in our lives by looking to these idealized and potentially misogynistic characters on the movie screen.

Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian theorist who believes that “fantasy is not the same as illusion; rather, fantasy organizes how we see and understand reality. It works as a frame through which we see and make sense of the world”(Storey, 107). In his “Passions of the Real, Passions of the Semblence,” Zizek writes about the events of September 11^th, 2001 and how most people experienced the event through television news coverage. We had been accustomed to experiencing fictionalized Hollywood movie versions of such a catastrophic event until that point. In effect, we fantasized about the very real terror that the collapsing towers created, until the reality presented itself to us and everything else seemed false in comparison. “The authentic twentieth-century passion for penetrating the Real Thing (ultimately, the destructive Void) through the cobweb of semblances which constitutes our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate ‘effect,’ sought after from digitalized special effects, through reality TV and amateur pornography, up to snuff movies”(Zizek, 12). In short, we prefer the fantasy and the desire that accompanies it. “Anxiety is the result of getting too close to what we desire, thus threatening to eliminate ‘lack’ itself and end desire”(Storey, 109).

Additional citation besides two textbooks:

Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso. 2002.

Questions:

How does a cultural super-ego compare or contrast to an organic intellectual?

How does Althusser’s conception of ideology connect to Lacan’s theories?

How would you locate Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze in a movie you saw recently?

--from your pals, Steve and David