Abstract
Psychoanalytic treatments of film encounter difficulties resembling those that Plato faced when he criticized tragedy: uncertainty over which persons are the objects of theoretical scrutiny; the call for the theorist’s anhedonia; and confusion between unperceived cognitive processes and those that are unconscious because disavowed. The uncertainty over objects lets us sort psychoanalyses of film according to whether they assess a film’s maker, its characters, the work, or its audience. Each approach shows promise but also comes with problems. Each approach also implies a stance on the refusal of pleasure. And the nature of the unconscious is always at stake. This survey of the field is sympathetic to the general enterprise but comments on the main objections that have arisen.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974–1975): 45.
- 2.
Plato Apology 22a–d.
- 3.
Plato Phaedrus 244a–245a.
- 4.
See, for example, Chapter 1 of On the Interpretation of Dreams.
- 5.
PlatoRepublic: people enjoy tragedies, 604d, 607d; Socrates sets his own love of Homer aside, 595d; comparison to being in love, 607e; “counter-charm” to poetry’s effects, 608a.
- 6.
On payment for treatment see, for example, Sigmund Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment” (1913), in Sigmund Freud et al., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1966) 12:121–144. See Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991), 61.
- 7.
James Joyce Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin Books, 1939), 115.
- 8.
H. R. Greenberg, Screen Memories: Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 14.
- 9.
Plato Republic 399e, 595b, 608a.
- 10.
Plato Republic: tragedy’s spectators made less rational, 605b–c, 606a–c; playwright already irrational, 603a, 603b, 605a–b; mimetic poetry represents humans, 393b–c, 395c–396d, 605a; dramatic characters attract attention, 605a, 605c–d.
- 11.
Plato Republic: mimetic poetry like mimetic painting, 602c–605b; misled perception, 602c–603a; corrupted passions, 606a.
- 12.
Examples include Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” (1908) Standard Edition 9:141–159; “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood,” Standard Edition 11:59–137. Also see Ronald Hayman, “Kafka and the Mice,” Partisan Review 48 (1981): 355–365.
- 13.
See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter 5 “The Material and Sources of Dreams,” Part D, “Typical Dreams.” Ernest Jones’s approach to Hamlet is also partly anticipated in the same section.
- 14.
Ernest Jones, “The Oedipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive,” The American Journal of Psychology 21, no. 1 (1910): 72–113.
- 15.
Jones’s reading of Hamlet collapses at times into a reading of Shakespeare, as when Jones remarks that “this conflict is an echo of a similar one in Shakspere [sic] himself,” in “The Oedipus-Complex,” 102.
- 16.
Krin Gabbard and Glen O. Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 187.
- 17.
For examples of such readings see Glen O. Gabbard, ed., Psychoanalysis and Film (London, New York: Karnac Books, 2001), a compilation of film reviews originally written for a psychoanalytic journal. Analysis of fictional characters seems to be the approach assumed by Barbara Creed, “Film and Psychoanalysis,” in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds., The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 77–90.
- 18.
These examples can all be found in David J. Robinson, Reel Psychiatry: Movie Portrayals of Psychiatric Conditions (Port Huron, Michigan: Rapid Psychler Press, 2003): folie à deux, 49; mania, 77; dissociative fugue state, 159.
- 19.
For a reading that takes a film as the recapitulation of dream-formation, see Stanley R. Palombo, “Hitchcock’s Vertigo: The Dream Function in Film,” in Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, eds., Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 44–63. On the same subject, see Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory (London: Arnold, 1997), 40.
- 20.
As they observe starting off their study, a “psychiatrist” is often equated with other figures. “American films have never completely succeeded in distinguishing psychiatrists from psychoanalysts, psychologists, social workers, and other therapists”: Gabbard and Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema, xvii.
- 21.
Also see Laurel Samuels, “Female Psychotherapists as Portrayed in Film, Fiction and Nonfiction,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 13 (1985): 367–378. Samuels finds mostly negative portrayals of women therapists, until nearly the time of her writing of the article.
- 22.
Gabbard and Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema: ineffectual quack in Bringing Up Baby, 58; unrealistic cathartic cure in Spellbound, together with (another) psychiatrist as villain, 63.
- 23.
Gabbard and Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema: onscreen breakthrough insights, 37; in Spellbound, 63; in Freud, 109.
- 24.
Stanley Cavell, “The Image of the Psychoanalyst in Film” [2000], in William Rothman, ed., Cavell on Film (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 295–304.
- 25.
Another example, from early in film history, is Blind Alley (Charles Vidor, 1939), with Ralph Bellamy as the detecting psychiatrist: Gabbard and Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema, 17. More recently, see Final Analysis (Phil Joanou, 1992), Side Effects (Steven Soderbergh, 2013).
- 26.
Baudry, “Ideological Effects”: “Just as the mirror assembles,” 45–46; “the projection operation,” 42.
- 27.
Baudry, “Ideological Effects,” 43.
- 28.
Baudry, “Ideological Effects,” 46.
- 29.
Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1974): 22.
- 30.
Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1977): scopophilia, castration, fetish, 69; cinematic representation teasingly protects the viewer, 69–72.
- 31.
I take Metz on castration and the fetish in these terms following Barbara Creed, “Film and Psychoanalysis.” I hate to endorse my gloss completely. Although this reading makes Metz’s view truer, it also threatens to return it to a mirror-stage analysis of the viewer, in which what always can only be at stake is the imaginary ego ideal.
- 32.
This paragraph has been informed and aided by Ben Singer, “Film, Photography, and Fetish: The Analyses of Christian Metz,” Cinema Journal 27, no. 4 (1988): 4–22; and by Jacqueline Rose, “The Cinematic Apparatus: Problems in Current Theory,” in Stephen Heath and Teresa de Lauretis, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 172–186.
- 33.
Thus, see his reading of Poe, which bypasses the author in favor of discussing the characters and narrative structures: Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” [1966], trans. Jeffrey Mehlman Yale French Studies 48 (1973): 39–72.
- 34.
Shoshana Felman puts the point explicitly, writing that for Lacan, “The status of the poet is no longer that of the (sick) patient but, if anything, that of the analyst”: “On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of Psychoanalytic Approaches,” in John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, eds., The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1988), 152. I should caution that Lacan’s own reading method has been characterized in incompatible ways by his adherents; E. Ann Kaplan, for instance, writes that he “takes the character rather than the author as a kind of case history”: “From Plato’s Cave to Freud’s Screen,” in Kaplan, ed., Psychoanalysis and Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 4. But the character exists as case history for the analyst (Lacan, for instance).
- 35.
See below for more comments on Cavell and the psychoanalytical treatment of film.
- 36.
See Baudry, “Ideological Effects”; also Dayan, “Tutor-Code.” Dayan does write, by way of offering a way out of the cave: “When I occupy the place of the subject, the codes which led me to occupy this place become invisible to me. The signifiers of the presence of the subject disappear from my consciousness because they are the signifiers of my presence... If I want to understand the painting and not just be instrumental in it as a catalyst to its ideological operation, I must avoid the empirical relationship it imposes on me” (27). Still I find it telling that this strategy is defined in entirely negative terms: “avoid the empirical relationship … refuse that identification.” We understand what not to do but not what will bring that liberation.
- 37.
On this point and for other telling arguments against Dayan, see William Rothman, “Against ‘The System of the Suture,’” Film Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1975): 45–50. More broadly, for critical assessments of several strands of psychoanalytic apparatus theory, see Noël Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and on the uses of psychoanalysis in horror films particularly, “Psychoanalysis and the Horror Film,” in Minerva’s Night Out: Philosophy, Pop Culture, and Moving Pictures (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 145–157.
- 38.
Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007): excesses of fantasy in film, 25; Paris, Texas, 198–199; Eyes Wide Shut, 46.
- 39.
Mary Ann Doane, “Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Constructions in Film Theory,” in Kaplan, ed., Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 55. On this failing of masculinist psychoanalytic theory, see Joan Copjec, “The Anxiety of the Influencing Machine,” October23 (1982): 43–59; David N. Rodowick, “The Difficulty of Difference,” Wide Angle 5, no. 1 (1982): 4–15; Thornham, Passionate Detachments, 39–40.
- 40.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6–18.
- 41.
Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” Framework 15–16–17 (1981): 12–25.
- 42.
Stanley Cavell: Pursuits of Happiness: The HollywoodComedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Contesting Tears: TheMelodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
- 43.
See Cavell, “Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman,” in Smith and Kerrigan, eds., Images in Our Souls, 11–43.
- 44.
Cavell, “Psychoanalysis and Cinema,” 29.
- 45.
See Cavell, “On Makavejev on Bergman,” in Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 106–140; especially 137–138. On this point also see Timothy Gould, “Stanley Cavell and the Plight of the Ordinary,” in Smith and Kerrigan, Images in Our Souls, 109–136.
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Pappas, N. (2019). Psychoanalysis and the Philosophy of Film. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_39
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