Chapter 5 – Psychoanalysis

Before you read

Warm-up

Psychoanalytical (especially Freudian) thinking is very much evident in contemporary popular culture texts today. Watch the following music video of DJ Snake, Lil Jon ‘Turn Down for What’ (2014) [link]. What Freudian themes, do you think, are exploited here?

Preliminary questions

Chapter 5 discusses key concepts of Psychoanalytical Theory, incorporating discussions on Sigmund Freud and ‘the unconscious’, models of the psyche (conscious, unconscious, id, ego and superego) and Freud’s interpretation of dreams. This is followed by a section on how Psychoanalysis was developed by Jacques Lacan using a structuralist approach, to explain what he saw as the three stages of human psychological development – the ‘mirror phase’, the ‘fort da’ game and the ‘Oedipus complex’.

In looking at its application to popular culture texts and practices (cine-psychoanalysis), Laura Mulvey’s work on cinema is also explored in this chapter (note that a critique of her work can be found later in Chapter 7 of Cultural Theory and Popular Culture). A discussion of Slavoj Žižek and Lacanian fantasy concludes the chapter, focusing specifically on how reality and fantasy are linked in a never-ending search for the satisfaction of our desires.

The following questions fall into four categories focusing, in turn, on Freud, Lacan, Mulvey and cine-psychoanalysis and Žižek. 

After you read: Important ideas

Psychoanalysis – as delineated in Chapter 5 – overviews a number of important ideas and their related contexts. Using Quizzes 5.1 and 5.2 revisit those ideas by deciding to what extent the statements below reflect on the core of psychoanalytical thinking as approached by cultural studies.

Quiz 5.1

Choose between true or false

1. 

The ego develops with our contact to culture

True

False

None

2. 

The manifest content of dreams is always larger than the latent.

True

False

None

3. 

The id is the most primitive part of our being.

True

False

None

4. 

The ego represents unrepressed passion.

True

False

None

5. 

Repression removes all traces of that which we cannot deal with.

True

False

None

6. 

The Oedipus Complex is best suited to explain teenage girls, their desires and behaviours.

True

False

None

7. 

Mulvey has been attacked for an uncritical use of Freudian psychoanalysis.

True

False

None

8. 

Mulvey's work gives due attention to issues of production, the economy and social context of the audience.

True

False

None

9. 

Psychoanalytic film studies is often accused of being deterministic and using universalising notions of female and male desire.

True

False

None

10. 

Many in Cultural Studies would now stress the role of active audiences, where viewers are not passive.

True

False

None

11. 

Film Studies has, on occasion, been accused of privileging the notion of the spectator as passive and of having a non-interactive relationship with the film text.

True

False

None

12. 

Cinema-going is as much about the pleasure of the film text as it is about a whole host of other cultural and social variables.

True

False

None

13. 

Female cinema-goers identify with passive, conformist and acquiescent film-stars.

True

False

None

14. 

Film consumption is a site of negotiated meanings, of resistance and of appropriation.

True

False

None

15. 

The relationship between a film and its audience is non-contradictory.

True

False

None

16. 

Ethnographic research suggests that Hollywood's patriarchal power is not monolithic and its success is never automatic.

True

False

None

17. 

Desire is always fulfilled.

True

False

None

18. 

Fantasy is the staging of desire.

True

False

None

19. 

Fantasy is the same as illusion.

True

False

None

20. 

Anxiety is brought on by the disappearance of ‘desire’.

True

False

None

21. 

Lacan is the greatest influence on Žižek’s work.

True

False

None

22. 

Reality is a fantasy construction, masking the ‘real’ of our desire

True

False

None

Time’s up

Quiz 5.2

Choose one answer

1. 

According to Lacan, we are born into a condition of

total happiness

lack

abundance

None

2. 

In Lacanian terms, Our lives can be understood as a quest in search of a moment of

plenitude

endless pleasure

misery

None

3. 

Lacan maintains that part of our search is undertaken in relation to the mirror phase. During this process, we begin to construct a sense of

solitude

sight

self

None

4. 

The mirror phase also allows subjects to make

imaginary identification

reflections

realizations

None

5. 

For Lacan, in the second phase of development, subjects use language to enter a realm called

the hallucinogenic

the symbolic

the hypnogogic

None

6. 

In this second phase, language intensifies the subject's experience of

plenitude

lack

excess

None

7. 

The subject's demands can be articulated through language, but they cannot always make good the experience of

plenitude

lack

excess

None

8. 

Yet it is in and through language that we become

subjects

happy

successful

None

9. 

Subjectivity is made in and through language, though our sense of being unique in this language is

fragile

strong

soft

None

10. 

For Lacan, the unconscious is structured along the lines of

language

feelings

actions

None

11. 

Mulvey's work investigates

why film is popular with women

the notion of the male gaze

post-feminist gaze in cinema

None

12. 

Women are often figured in film in relation to

male desire

same-sex desire

asexuality

None

13. 

Her theory proposes that women in film often seem to be signifiers of

anti-family values

the threat of castration

the threat of adultery

None

14. 

Mulvey's work constitutes an attack on

all male cinema-goers

conservative female audiences

scopophilia

None

15. 

Scopophilia, insists Mulvey, refers to the pleasure in looking as well as

the sexual objectification of women in film

male and female heterosexuality

male and female homosexuality

None

16. 

Mulvey draws particularly on the work of Freud and

Lacan’s notion of the mirror phase

Althusser’s notion of ideological state apparatus

Adorno’s notion of culture industry

None

17. 

Popular cinema is structured around moments of narrative and moments of

discontent

spectacle

performativity

None

18. 

Women in popular cinema are invariably figured as

sexual objects

active agents

passive toys

None

19. 

Mulvey argues that cinema

should be concerned about the needs of sensitive men

should be more interested in problems with masculinity

should not be obsessively subordinated to the needs of the male ego

None

20. 

According to Mulvey, film should be

dialectical, challenging and avant-garde

illusionistic, compelling and always pleasurable

speculative, futuristic and engaged

None

Time’s up

Important names

Sigmund Freud

Jacques Lacan

Laura Mulvey

Slavoj Zizek

Complementary materials

<Insert Icon 4 here> Watch an excerpt from Žižek’s Guide to Ideology [link]. How does it explain the entanglement of culture, psychology and politics? How does it reflect on “ideological fantasy” and the difference between the imaginary and the real?

Further considerations

Consider films like Psycho (1960; 1998), Alien and its sequels (1979– ), Fight Club (1999), Black Swan (2010), Inception (2010), Night Crawler (2014) and Birdman (2014) among others. Analyse these texts from a psychoanalytical standpoint. What themes are foregrounded?

Following this, on the basis of reading some of the revisions and expansions of Mulvey’s work, decide what you think about films, movie stars and cinema-going. To help you, choose an example of a film from the classic film-noir genre. First, watch it for evidence to support Mulvey’s position. Be as specific as you can. Then, consider critics’ views on her perspective. Which are you convinced by the most? Why?