Psychoanalysis

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Psychoanalysis Subjectivity

• Article By Mandy Merck
• Powerpoint By Sianna Byrne

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Outline

• Aims / Guide Questions (3 minutes)
• Review of Lacan (5 minutes)
• Importance of Psychoanalysis (7 minutes)
• Other opinions (8 minutes)
• Question Answer (2 minutes)

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Guide Questions

• What is subjectivity?
• What are the problems with using Lacanian
  psychoanalysis to study films?

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Jacques Lacan

• Theory that the subject is constituted in lack
  and relation to Symbolic order
• Linguistic elements are defined in terms of
  rule-governed relations, not simply in terms of
  what they signify.
• Phallus (Symbolic) vs. penis (biological)

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Marnie Why She Cannot Kill Her Horse
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Importance of Psychoanalysis

• Lacans emphasis on language as constituent of
  gender draws attention to construction of gender
  representations in film text as a signifying
  practice.
• This also reveals what film text represses due to
  the dominant beliefs of what is sexually proper.

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Why We Care

• 1970s poststructuralist film theory
• Emphasis shifted from meaning residing in the
  text of a film
• Emphasis was placed on the meaning constructed in
  reading/viewing the text
• This included new formal mechanisms
• Suture
• Notions of identification
• The male gaze

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Dirty Dancing?
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Other Opinions Criticisms

• Abstraction vs. Mechanism
• Female spectatorship
• Problems with visual approach
• Language Sexual Difference

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General Criticism

• Viewing subject is only a generalized
  abstraction, without individual history or
  prejudice.
• Defense Film text imposes formal mechanisms
  (suture, the gaze) to supercede empirical
  realities and position the subject.

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Laura Mulvey

• Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen,
  1975
• Used Lacan to set parameters of the
  screen-spectator relationship.
• Emphasized constructions of gender roles within a
  phallocentric discourse.
• Male fullness, female desire/castration
• a world based on sexual imbalance

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Stephen Heath

• Lacan reflects biases of patriarchal society.
• Critical of Lacans visual justification of
  female castration.
• any vision, is constructed, not given
• It is an appeal to the natural.
• Psychoanalysis understands instability of
  subjectivity and gender, but still relies on
  concrete basic phallus inequality.

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Donald Williamson

• Argues that Lacan must refer to phallus as
  signifier AND organ.
• Lacan insists phallus is a signifier of the
  Symbolic, not the biological
• BUT how does an infant in the Imaginary recognize
  sexual difference to reach the Symbolic?
• Subjects awareness must be linked with an
  observation.

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Question Answer

• Distinction between the phallus and penis was
  first focused on by ___________.
• This resulted in a new focus on the
  ____-_________ relationship.
• T/F Gender inequalities are all naturally
  understood.