Psychoanalytic Analysis Flashcards
Be able to define and know these concepts well.
Why do media studies scholars adopt a psychoanalytic framework to analyze media artefacts?
Repressed or lost desires influence the creation of media artefacts and explain the mental drives activated by those artefacts.
This approach is generally grounded in:
The genesis of individual psychology
The psychology of the media artefact
The ways in which the two interact in the process of media consumption
Psychoanalytic analysis
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Freudian Psychoanalysis
Components on the human psyche
Freud’s Model of The Human Psyche
Conscious awareness provided by your senses
Perceptional Consciousness
Things easily called to your conscious mind
Pre-Conscious
Perceptional consciousness + pre-conscious
Conscious Mind
Associated with the Pleasure Principle – the uncontrollable human drive to satisfy desire, including libido, human sexual desire
The one and only urge of the Id is toward satisfaction
“It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality”
Id
Associated with the Reality Principle – the constant curbing of desire according to possibility; laws, both written and unwritten; and social convention
Superego
Acts according to the reality principle and seeks to please the id’s drive in realistic ways
Ego
The boundary between the conscious and unconscious is ______
permeable
The unconscious can reveal itself through _____ and _____
dreams and slips of the tongue (Freudian slip)
Jacque Lacan (1901-1981)
Lacanian Psychoanalysis
The pre-linguistic realm
A moment of recognition and misrecognition
The Imaginary
The Mirror Stage
The actual environment of the theatre activates psychoanalytic desires in spectators, and they can unconsciously rejoice in mirror stage feelings of wholeness, mastery, and control while watching the film
Apparatus Theory
“Nom du père” - “Name of the Father”“Law of the Father”
The NO of the father
Language and Lack
The Symbolic
The symbolic realm – structures, orders, and constrains the impulse for the Imaginary.
Language
Our individual subjectivity or consciousness is actually an effect of language and symbols because we are forced to use them to articulate a consciousness or an identity.
We can never return to the real.
Yearning for absent pleasures
We are trapped in a reality whose social order and language keep us from knowing or expressing pleasure full
The state of human existence
Lack
process of sexual development/Oedipus complex
Freud
process of sexual development/Oedipus complex
Lacan
Key Similarity between Freud and Lacan
“the phallus” as a symbol of power in the creation of the human psyche
A social condition where images or representation of the penis carry connotations of power
i.e. • Codpiece
• Armour from the middle ages – phallic symbol of the power of the knights
• Movie: A Clockwork Orange
• Hitchcock’s Pyscho – The Shower
o Knife as the phallic symbol
o She is an adulterer – the phallic knife punishes her
Phallocentrism
pleasure in looking (neutral)
scopophilia
pleasure in watching a desired object or person from a distance; pleasure in not being seen
voyeurism
psychic structuring of an object or part of a person as a source of sexual pleasure
fetishism
appetite for something that promises enjoyment, satisfaction, and pleasure in its attainment; act of desiring creates fantasy
desire
mental representation of conscious or unconscious wish fulfillment; media artefacts are an expression of fantasy presented as reality
fantasy
a fantasy is not desire itself; it is a mental structure that contains the manifestation and achievement of desire
scene
the prolonging of lack; pleasure comes from not getting what we want but from pursuit in what we want
deferral
media’s frequent positioning of women as objects coded for strong visual and erotic impact
• Male/subject/looker and female/object looked at
The male gaze
The female gaze?
Female Spectatorship
