Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud 1856 1939 Main works The

Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud (1856 -1939), Main works: The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) Totem and Taboo (1913) Civilisation and its Discontents (1930)

The Unconscious There is more in our minds than we are aware of. We are vulnerable to emotional and irrational appeals which we cannot explain. Our mind creates a barrier between the conscious and the unconscious – repression.

Freud’s structural hypothesis Id - the psychic representatives of the drives. Ego – those functions which have to do with the individual’s relation to his environment Superego – the moral precepts (conscience) of our minds as well as our ideal aspirations.

Freud’s topographic model

Acquiring identity Masculinity and femininity are the result of conditioning – childhood in focus. Stages of individual’s development: oral, anal, phallic, genital. The Oedipus complex – linked to the stage in which an individual desires the parent of the opposite sex. Feminist critique, castration anxiety & penis envy

Symbols & dreams Represent condensed or displaced meanings that reveal dreamerunconscious fears or desires. Three types of symbols: - Conventional Accidental Universal -

Carl Jung (1875 -1961) The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected work, 1991) The Structure of the Psyche 11

The Archetypes Universal themes found in dreams, myths, stories, religions and works of art. Models of people, behaviours and personalities They are universal not only within a civilization but most of them are also shared between civilizations. They exist in the collective unconscious.

4+1 major archetypes The Self – represents the unified consciousness and unconsciousness. The Shadow – consists of the sex and life instincts, composed of repressed ideas, desires, weaknesses. The Anima (feminine image in the male psyche) and the Animus (male image in the female psyche) The Persona – self-presentation, a mask. The Hero

Gaze and spectatorial subjectivity Laura Mulvey - (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema - (1981) Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Places the film within the mechanism of reproduction and control that reinforces socially established norms of sexuality and regulates the production and the practices of looking at texts and images.

Gaze It marks the relations of power that reach beyond the situation of spectacle and individual spectatorship. (Foucault): It stands for the mechanisms of intersubjective struggle within the network of power where social institutions and dominant discourses enact a normalizing and controlling gaze upon their subjects to discipline them. The act of looking caught up in dynamics of desire, e. g. for control over the object of looking. In psychoanalytic theory, the gaze is linked to fantasy (e. g. J. Lacan)

Pioneer work Mulvey asks how the unconscious of patriarchal society has been integrated into narrative cinema and what is the woman’s place in the phallocentric order. Male gaze: the power of the look in relation to cinema is male, while the female is positioned as the object of fetishistic desire. Pushes feminist film theory to address e. g. cinematic representations of women and femininity, the nature o spectatorship and identification processes.