One of the first artistic movements to draw on psychoanalysis was the Surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In their quest for new modes of experience that transgressed the boundaries between dream and reality, the Surrealists extolled the potential of the cinema. They were deeply influenced by Freud's theory of dreams and his concept of the unconscious. To them, the cinema, with its special techniques such as the dissolve, superimposition, and slow motion, correspond to the nature of dreaming.
André Breton, the founder of the movement, saw cinema as a way of entering the marvellous, that realm of love and liberation. Recent studies by writers such as Hal Foster (1993) argue that Surrealism was also bound up with darker forces - explicated by Freud - such as the death drive, the compulsion to repeat, and the uncanny. Certainly, the films of the greatest exponent of cinematic Surrealism, Luis Buñuel (Un chien andalou, France, 1928; The Exterminating Angel, Mexico, 1962; and That Obscure Object of Desire, France, 1977), explore the unconscious from this perspective. Not all theorists used Freud. Others drew on the ideas of Carl Gustav Jung, and particularly his theory of archetypes, to understand film. The archetype is an idea or image that has been central to human existence and inherited psychically from the species by the individual. Archetypes include: the shadow or the underside of consciousness; the anima, that is the feminine aspect in men; and the animus, orthe masculine aspect in women. But generally, Jungian theory has never been widely applied to the cinema. Apart from Clark Branson's Howard Hawks: A Jungian Study (1987) and
John Izod's The Films of Nicolas Roeg: Myth and Mind (1992), critical works consist mainly of articles, by authors such as Albert Benderson (1979), Royal S. Brown (1980), and Don Fredericksen (1980), which analyse archetypes in the film text. Writers of the 1970s who turned to Freud and Lacan - the two most influential psychoanalysts - were critical, however, of what they perceived to be an underlying essentialism in Jungian theory, that is a tendency to explain subjectivity in unchanging, universal terms.
Many of Freud's theories have been used in film theory: the unconscious; the return of the repressed; Oedipal drama; narcissism; castration; and hysteria. Possibly his most important contributions were his accounts of the unconscious, subjectivity, and sexuality. According to Freud, large parts of human thought remain unconscious; that is, the subject does not know about the content of certain troubling ideas and often much effort is needed to make them conscious. Undesirable thoughts will be repressed or kept from consciousness by the ego under the command of the super-ego, or conscience. In Freud's 4ew, repression is the key to understanding the neuroses. Repressed thoughts can manifest themselves in dreams, nightmares, slips of the tongue, and forms of artistic activity. These ideas have also influenced film study and some psychoanalytic critics explore the 'unconscious' of the film text - referred to as the 'subtext' - analysing it for repressed contents, perverse utterances, and evidence of the workings of desire.
Freud's notion of the formation of subjectivity is more complex. Two concepts are central: division and sexuality. The infantile ego is a divided entity. The ego refers to the child's sense of self; however, because the child, in its narcissistic phase, also takes itself, invests in itself, as the object of its own libidinal drives, the ego is both subject and object. The narcissistic ego is formed in its relationship to others. One of the earliest works influenced by Freud's theory of the double was Otto's Rank's 1925 classic The Double which was directly influenced by a famous movie of the day, The Student of Prague (Germany, 1913). In his later rewriting of Freud, Lacan took Freud's notion of the divided self as the basis of his theory of the formation of subjectivity in the mirror phase (see below), which was to exert a profound influence on film theory in the 1970s.
Sexuality becomes crucial during the child's Oedipus complex. Initially, the child exists in a two-way, or dyadic, relationship with the mother. But eventually, the child must leave the maternal haven and enter the domain of law and language. As a result of the appearance of a third figure - the father - in the child's life, the child gives up its love-desire for the mother. The dyadic relationship becomes triadic. This is the moment of the Oedipal crisis. The boy represses his feelings for the mother because he fears the father will punish him, possibly even castrate him - that is, make him like his
mother, whom he now realizes is not phallic. Prior to this moment the boy imagined the mother was just like himself. On the understanding that one day he will inherit a woman of his own, the boy represses his desire for the mother. This is what Freud describes as the moment of 'primal repression'; it ushers in the formation of the unconscious. The girl gives up her love for the mother, not because she fears castration (she has nothing to lose) but because she blames the mother for not giving her a penis-phallus. She realizes that only those who possess the phallus have power. Henceforth, she transfers her love to her father, and later to the man she will marry. But, as with the boy, her repressed desire can, at any time, surface, bringing with it a problematic relationship with the mother. The individual who is unable to come to terms with his or her proper gender role (activity for boys, passivity for girls) may become an hysteric; that is, repressed desires will manifest themselves as bodily or mental symptoms such as paralysis or amnesia. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (USA, 1960) and Marnie (USA, 1964) present powerful examples of what might happen to the boy and girl respectively if they fail to resolve the Oedipus complex.
Freud's theories were discussed most systematically in relation to the cinema after the post structuralist revolution in theory during the 1970s. In particulars writers applied the Oedipal trajectory to the narrative structures of classical film texts. They pointed to the fact that all narratives appeared to exhibit an Oedipal trajectory; that is, the (male) hero was confronted with a crisis in which he had to assert himself over another man (often a father figure) in order to achieve social recognition and win the woman. In this way, film was seen to represent the workings of patriarchal ideology. In an early two-part article, 'Monsters from the ID' (1970, 1971), which pre-dates the influences of poststructuralist criticism, Margaret Tarratt analysed the science fiction film. She argued that previous writers, apart from French critics, all view science fiction films as 'reflections of society's anxiety about its increasing technological prowess and its responsibility to control the gigantic forces of destruction it possesses' (Tarratt 1970: 38). Her aim was to demonstrate that the genre was 'deeply involved with concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis and seen in many cases to derive their structure from it' (38). In particular, science fiction explores the individual's repressed sexual desires, viewed as incompatible with civilized morality. Utilizing Freud's argument that whatever is repressed will return, Tarratt discusses Oedipal desire, castration anxiety, and violent sadistic male desire.
Source: Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998
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