Psychoanalysis

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Psychoanalysis

CINEMA AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
CINEMA AND THE MIRROR
REDISCOVERING THE GAZE
FURTHER READING

It is not accidental that psychoanalysis and the cinema were born in the same year. In 1895, Auguste (1862–1954) and Louis Lumière (1864–1948) conducted the first public film screening in the basement of the Grand Café in Paris; the same year also witnessed the publication of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Josef Breuer's Studies on Hysteria, the founding text of psychoanalysis. In this book, Freud and Breuer make public their discovery of the unconscious, the central psychoanalytic concept that, in fact, inaugurates psychoanalysis as a discipline. The existence of the unconscious means there is a limit to human self-knowledge. Our desire exists beyond this limit and thus remains fundamentally unknown to us. The unconscious includes repressed ideas, ideas we cannot consciously know because they are too traumatic for us. The traumatic nature of the unconscious renders it irreducible to our knowledge: it exceeds every attempt to know it directly. But this is not to say we cannot encounter the unconscious. Freud's conception of how one encounters the unconscious highlights the importance of psychoanalytic theory for the cinema.

As Freud makes clear in the Interpretation of Dreams (1900), the dream provides us with access to the unconscious through the way it distorts our latent thoughts in the process Freud calls the "dream-work." The dream-work alters thoughts existing in the mind by condensing multiple thoughts into one and displacing traumatic thoughts onto related nontraumatic ones. Above all, the dream-work translates our thoughts into images structured in a narrative form that is the dream itself. Through this activity of translation and distortion, the dream allows us to encounter unconscious ideas too traumatic for waking life. The dream enacts a traumatic encounter with our unconscious desire. The bizarre nature of dreams thus becomes evidence of unconscious processes, which are only visible indirectly through the distortion they create. For this reason, according to Freud, the dream is "the royal road to the unconscious." (This distortion is also evident, however, in slips of the tongue, forgetting, and jokes.) In light of the importance of the dream for the development of psychoanalysis, the link between psychoanalysis and the cinema becomes clearer: this structure can be seen in cinema as the site of public dreams, a unique opportunity to examine the unconscious outside of an analytic session.

CINEMA AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Unfortunately, few filmmakers have actively taken up the possibilities that an understanding of psychoanalysis affords the cinema. Much of this is due, undoubtedly, to the place that film production occupies within a capitalist economy: the exigencies of profit place a premium on films that will appease rather than traumatize spectators. If Hollywood films open themselves to the trauma of the unconscious, they most often close this opening through their denouements. As a result, most commercial films show us how we can subdue and master trauma, not, as psychoanalysis has it, how trauma subdues and masters us. Films about psychoanalysis, including John Huston's Freud (1962) and Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), deal with psychoanalysis on the level of their content rather than integrating it into their form (though Hitchcock's film does include a dream sequence with images created by the surrealist painter Salvador Dali).

Psychoanalysis made its presence felt most directly through the development of the film noir tradition. While few noir films explicitly address psychoanalytic concepts, the narrative structure and mise-en-scène of the noir universe evinces a kind of fidelity to them. The noir detective figure is much like the analyst: he probes the underside of society—the night—in search of the repressed truth that one cannot discover in the light of day. On this quest for truth, the noir detective discovers the essential corruption and disorder of society—the absence of any purity. Hence the noir detective discovers that truth is inseparable from desire, that truth is desire itself. This structure can be seen in classic noirs such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Big Sleep (1946), and Out of the Past (1947), as well as in neo-noirs such as Chinatown (1974).

Despite its forceful exploration of the unconscious dimension of experience, film noir remains, on the structural level, pre-Freudian. It sustains a narrative structure that obscures rather than emphasizes the workings of the unconscious. Serious attempts to integrate Freud's ideas on the unconscious and on dreams directly into film form were confined primarily to avant-garde, nonnarrative cinema. One notable exception is surrealist director Luis Buñuel (1900–1983), who formally emphasizes the repetitive nature of desire and its constitutive failure to find its object in such films as Belle de Jour (1967), Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972), and Cet obscur objet du désir (The Obscure Object of Desire, 1977). In each case, the very narrative itself remains caught up in a cycle of repetition that forces us as spectators to experience the distorting power of desire itself.

Despite the importance of Buñuel to the cinematic development of the insights of psychoanalysis, perhaps no director, either in Hollywood or outside of it, has done more to develop an aesthetic on the basis of dream-work than David Lynch (b. 1946). Lynch's films depart from the structure of traditional narrative in order to follow the logic of the dream. Especially in films such as Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001), Lynch includes narrative turns that seem to defy any versimilitude in an effort to respect this logic. However, unlike many avant-garde filmmakers, Lynch does not attempt to break from narrative altogether. The spectator can always discern the narrative trajectory of a Lynch film, even though this trajectory itself may confound expectations. When characters are miraculously transformed into other characters or the laws of temporality are ignored, this indicates Lynch's attempt to construct a realism of the unconscious. One often sees montage sequences, as in Blue Velvet (1986), that do not advance the narrative but work instead to reveal the unconscious associations of a particular character. Most importantly, all of Lynch's films lead the spectator to a traumatic encounter with the spectator's own desire elicited by the film. In the act of watching a Lynch film, one has one's own desire as a spectator exposed, in a way similar to the patient on the analytic couch. Though film for a long time resisted the full implications of psychoanalysis in favor of a form that worked to quiet the spectator's desire, with the films of David Lynch, cinema finally registers the potentially radical impact that psychoanalytic insights might have on film form and on the relationship between film and spectator.

Because of their investment in cinematically exploring the unconscious, Lynch's films have produced many exemplary psychoanalytic interpretations. These works tend to see the films in terms of fantasy, repetition compulsion, or Oedipal crisis. For instance, psychoanalytic interpretations of Blue Velvet often understand the film as reenacting the fantasy of the primal scene in order to investigate the role this fantasy plays in the development of male sexuality and subjectivity. Or they see the circular structure of Lost Highway as the depiction of the inescapability of repetition. Even beyond Lynch, these are the directions that psychoanalytic interpretation often takes, but such interpretive uses of psychoanalysis are relatively recent.

CINEMA AND THE MIRROR

Film theory, too, despite the structural link between psychoanalysis and cinema, did not immediately develop in the direction of psychoanalysis. The first attempt to understand the cinema in psychological terms occurred in 1916, when Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916) wrote The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, a book that stressed the parallel between the structure of the human mind and the filmic experience. However, Münsterberg's concern is only the conscious mind, not the unconscious; he is thus a psychologist, not a psychoanalyst, more neo-Kantian than Freudian. From 1916 onward, this focus on the conscious experience of the spectator predominated in film theory, as attested by the work of important film theorists such as André Bazin and Sergei Eisenstein. Though Bazin and Eisenstein agree on little, they do share a belief that film's importance lies in its conscious impact. Neither considers the unconscious. Film theory took many years to begin to think of the cinematic experience in terms of the unconscious, but when it commenced, psychoanalytic film theory came in the form of a tidal wave in the 1970s and 1980s.

The primary focus of this wave of psychoanalytic film theory was the process of spectator identification understood through French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's idea of the mirror stage. Even more than Freud himself, Lacan, despite the difficulty of his work and its lack of availability in English translation, was the central reference point for the emergence of psychoanalytic film theory. In truth, psychoanalytic film theory has from its incipience been almost exclusively Lacanian film theory. According to Lacan, the mirror stage occurs in infants between six and eighteen months of age, when they misrecognize themselves while looking in the mirror. The infant's look in the mirror is a misrecognition because the infant sees its fragmentary body as a whole and identifies itself with this illusory unity. In the process, the infant assumes a mastery over the body that it does not have, and this self-deception forms the basis for the development of the infant's ego. By detailing the formation of the ego through an imaginary process, Lacan thereby undermines the substantial status that the ego has in some versions of psychoanalysis (especially American ego psychology, often the target of Lacan's most vituperative attacks). The attractiveness of this idea for film theory is readily apparent if we can accept the analogy between Lacan's infant and the cinematic spectator.

Psychoanalytic film theorists such as Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry took this analogy as their point of departure. For them, the film screen serves as a mirror through which the spectator can identify himself or herself as a coherent and omnipotent ego. The sense of power that spectatorship provides derives from the spectator's primary identification with the camera itself. Though the spectator is in actual fact a passive (and even impotent) viewer of the action on the screen, identification with the camera provides the spectator with an illusion of unmitigated power over the screen images. Within the filmic discourse, the camera knows no limit: it goes everywhere, sees everyone, exposes everything. The technological nature of the filmic medium (unlike, say, the novel) prevents a film from capturing absence. The camera inaugurates a regime of visibility from which nothing escapes, and this complete visibility allows spectators to believe themselves to be all-seeing (and thus all-powerful). What secures the illusory omnipotence of the spectator is precisely the spectator's own avoidance of being seen. Like God, the spectator sees all but remains constitutively unseen in the darkened auditorium.

The above scenario functions, however, only insofar as it remains unconscious and the spectator sustains the sense of being unseen. This is why, according to this version of psychoanalytic film theory, classical Hollywood narratives work to hide the camera's activity. Once the camera itself becomes an obvious presence rather than an invisible structuring absence, the spectator loses the position of omnipotence along with the camera and becomes part of the cinematic event. When this happens, the spectator becomes aware that the film is a product and not simply a reality. To forestall this recognition, classical Hollywood editing works to create a reality effect, a sense that the events on the screen are really happening and not just the result of a filmic act of production. In this regard, classical Hollywood cinema functions like commodity fetishism, working to hide the labor that goes into the production of its commodity. When thinking about early psychoanalytic film theory, a reference to commodity fetishism is almost unavoidable, which suggests the strong link that has existed between psychoanalytic film theory and Marxist theory.

One cannot separate the early manifestation of psychoanalytic film theory from its political dimension. In addition to relying on Lacan's notion of the mirror stage, Baudry and other psychoanalytic film theorists take their bearings from Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. For them, Althusser's notion of ideological interpellation (developed in his essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 1970) provides a way of thinking about the political implications of the mirror stage. For Althusser, ideology hails concrete individuals as subjects, causing them to regard themselves—mistakenly—as the creative agents behind their experiences. The illusion of agency is thus the fundamental ideological deception.

According to psychoanalytic film theorists, the cinematic experience perpetuates this ideological deception through the mirror relationship it sets up for the spectator. Insofar as traditional narrative film blinds the spectator to the way that film addresses or hails the spectator as a subject, every traditional narrative participates in the process of ideological interpellation and control. Hollywood film invites spectators to accept an illusory idea of their own power, and in doing so, it hides from spectators their actual passivity. For early psychoanalytic film theory, cinema's ideological victory consists of convincing spectators to enjoy the very process that subjugates them. This line of thought finds its fullest development in the British journal Screen throughout the 1970s.

It is also in Screen that theorists first began to link psychoanalytic film theory to feminist concerns. One of the most fecund developments in psychoanalytic film theory occurred through this alliance. In 1975 Laura Mulvey wrote "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," perhaps the most anthologized and most quoted essay in the entire history of film theory. The importance of this essay for the subsequent development of film theory cannot be overstated. Basing her essay on the pioneering work of Metz and Baudry, Mulvey links the process of spectator identification to sexual difference. According to Mulvey, a secondary identification with character accompanies the spectator's primary identification with the camera, and this identification with a filmic character is most often, at least in Hollywood cinema, an identification with a male character.

The spectator's sense of power is, for Mulvey, a definitively masculine sense of power. The spectator, then, is gendered male. On the screen, the male character, the site of identification, drives the movement of the film's narrative and is the character whose movement the camera follows. The female character serves as a spectacle for both the spectator and the latter's screen proxy, the male character, to look at. This process, which Mulvey termed the "gaze," deprives the female subject of her subjectivity, reducing her to a "to-be-looked-at-ness" that provides pleasure for the male spectator. Mulvey's appropriation of psychoanalysis for feminism is meant to destroy this pleasurable experience through the act of analyzing it. Here again, psychoanalytic theory is inseparable from the specific political program it serves.

REDISCOVERING THE GAZE

Due in large part to the impact of Mulvey's essay, psychoanalytic film theory grew so popular in the 1980s that it became identified, especially in the minds of its detractors, with film theory as such. In the 1990s, however, psychoanalytic film theory almost ceased to be practiced and was reduced to being an idea to refute in the process of introducing another way of thinking about film. Its demise led to a general retreat from theory to empirical research within the film studies field. But psychoanalytic film theory did not completely die out. Acknowledging twenty years of critiques of psychoanalytic film theory focused on spectator identification, a new manifestation of psychoanalytic film theory developed through an act of self-criticism. In Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (1994), Joan Copjec completely revolutionized psychoanalytic film theory. Copjec pointed out that psychoanalytic film theory had based itself on a radical misunderstanding of Lacan's concept of the gaze, which he does not develop in his essay on the mirror stage but in a later seminar translated as The Four FundamentalConcepts of Psycho-Analysis (1978). The gaze, as Copjec explains it, is not on the side of the looking subject; it is an objective gaze, a point on—or, rather, absent from—the film screen. Rather than being the spectator's look of (illusory and deceptive) mastery, it is the point in the film image where this mastery fails. Instead of reducing the film screen to the mirror in which spectators can identify themselves, Copjec understands the screen as the site of the gaze, which is the object motivating the spectator's desire.

Psychoanalytic film theory had been too eager to think in terms of spectator identification and thus forgot about the role of spectator desire. According to psycho-analysis, desire is triggered by a missing object—an absence. Though the camera has the effect of rendering everything it photographs visible, it cannot create a field of unlimited visibility. Though films may work to dis-guise the limits of visibility, these limits are actually necessary for engaging the spectator's desire. The spectator desires to see a film only if it remains absent from the field of vision. It is this absence, not the illusion of gaining visual omnipotence, that draws the spectator into the events on the screen. The spectator thus seeks an object in the filmic image that remains irreducible to that image and irretrievable there. The encounter with this absence is traumatic for the spectator, shattering the ego and dislodging the spectator from her or his position of illusory safety. As films often make us aware, we as spectators are not separate from the screen but present there as an absence. When films push us toward the recognition of this unconscious involvement, we confront the public elaboration of our unconscious desire.

Though there is an implicit political valence to this turn in psychoanalytic film theory, it breaks from previous versions by refusing to place psychoanalytic insights in the service of a pre-formulated political program. Instead, Copjec's psychoanalytic film theory takes unconscious desire—the founding idea of psychoanalysis—as its starting point for understanding the cinema. In this sense, there is a homology between the emergence of Lynch's filmmaking and this innovation in psychoanalytic film theory. Both focus on the role of unconscious desire in film rather than on the process of identification. It is not coincidental that film theorists such as Slavoj Žižek, following in Copjec's wake, have turned their attention to the films of David Lynch.

With her revision of the traditional understanding of the gaze, Copjec authored a revolution in psychoanalytic film theory. It now becomes clear that the link between psychoanalysis and the cinema is even tighter than it initially seemed. No longer do we need to use psycho-analysis exclusively to help us decode cinematic manipulation and ideological control. Instead, psychoanalysis and cinema become locatable as part of a shared project that emerges out of a recognition of the power of the unconscious. Both psychoanalysis and cinema, in their best manifestations, represent attempts to embrace the trauma that constitutes us as subjects. In doing so, one discovers that this trauma is at once the source of our enjoyment as well. Psychoanalytic film theory can now look at films in terms of the way in which they relate to the gaze and thereby recognize how they mobilize spectators' desires and appeal to their fantasies. This allows psychoanalytic film theory to finally arrive at the fundamental questions that the cinema poses for us as individual subjects and for culture at large.