Chapter 5: Psychoanalysis
variations and derivations of Freudian psychology
Sigmund Freud
- Conscious: what we’re aware of, outward-facing
- Unconscious: what we’re not aware of, inward-facing
- sublimation: base instincts that are suppressed by socialization
- repression: shunting traumas from the conscious to the unconscious
- the Psyche: continuous struggle of conscious/unconscious, pleasure/reality
- id: instinctive desires, pleasure principle, and libido
- ego: intellectual response desire, reality principle
- superego: internalization of authority, develops through Oedipal Compex
- Oedipal Complex
- boys: desire mother, resent father, fear authority, realize they’ll be fathers
- girls: desire father, resent mother, realize they’ll be mothers/have babies
- Dreams: indirect access to repressed feelings, analyze to integrate into ego
- Literary Analysis: treat the “text” like a dream
- author-centric: the artist’s dream, some audience might share it
- reader-centric: reader gets pleasure without shame & is context of meaning
Jacque Lacan: structuralism + Freudianism
- Lack: “lost object,” desire for the Real that can never be fulfilled
- the Real: unity with mother, no separate identity (i.e., subjectivity)
- Mirror Phase: recognize self in mirror, become both subject and object
- the imaginary: build identify by identifying with objects
- fort-da game: find objects that substitute for lack of the Real/mother
- the Symbolic: entry into language, ever-receding identity: castration
- Oedipal Complex: realize we can never have the Real/mother
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
- Male Gaze: mode of looking at women’s bodies movies, a form of pleasure
- Scopophilic: watching women anonymously, objectification/separation
- Narcissistic: identifying with men, splits identity (like the mirror stage)
- the Look: men look at men looking at women (identification)
- men look at men having sex with women (separation)
- To-be-looked-at-ness: women as objects of visual pleasure
- Threat of Castration (i.e, the female body): entry into language, loss of the Real,
- Investigate: devalue, punish, and/or save women
- Fetishization of specific women’s bodies as objects
Slavoj Žižek and Lacanian Fantasy
- Lacan as organizing principle of Marxist critique of culture industry
- Culture Industry: acts like Lacanian language, produces fantasies of desire
- Fantasy: depicts the lost objects of desire (i.e., the Real)
- Desire: unfulfillable (because it’s gone if you fulfil it) & retroactively constructed
