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Psychoanalysis & Subjectivity

Psychoanalysis & Subjectivity. Article By : Mandy Merck Powerpoint By : Sianna Byrne. Outline:. Aims / Guide Questions (3 minutes) Review of Lacan (5 minutes) Importance of Psychoanalysis (7 minutes) Other opinions (8 minutes) Question & Answer (2 minutes). Guide Questions.

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Psychoanalysis & Subjectivity

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  1. Psychoanalysis & Subjectivity Article By : Mandy Merck Powerpoint By : Sianna Byrne

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

  3. Guide Questions • What is subjectivity? • What are the problems with using Lacanian psychoanalysis to study films?

  4. 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)

  5. Marnie & Why She Cannot Kill Her Horse

  6. Importance of Psychoanalysis • Lacan’s 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.

  7. 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”

  8. “Dirty Dancing”?

  9. Other Opinions & Criticisms • Abstraction vs. Mechanism • Female spectatorship • Problems with visual approach • Language & Sexual Difference

  10. 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.

  11. 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”

  12. Stephen Heath • Lacan reflects biases of patriarchal society. • Critical of Lacan’s 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.

  13. 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? • Subject’s awareness must be linked with an observation.

  14. 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.

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