Introduction

Why psychoanalysis?

Psychoanalysis is a useful Psychoanalysis is not necessarily Oedipal themes have

tool for understanding the uncovering essential truths, but rather is recurred throughout
human psyche in our linked to the particular moment of Western literature and are
industrial social bourgeois capitalism that gave birth to relevant to our current state
organization. it. of society.

Oedipal themes occur at those historical moments when the human family is
structured in specific ways that elicit Oedipal traumas.
 Film and Psychoanalysis in Capitalism

● The psychic patterns created by capitalist social and

interpersonal structures require a machine (film) for their
unconscious release.
● Psychoanalysis is necessary for understanding and adjusting
disturbances caused by these structures.
● Both film and psychoanalysis support the status quo but are
inserted in history, linked to the moment of bourgeois capitalism.
 The Importance of Psychoanalysis for
Women

Psychoanalysis is a tool Commercial film,

for unlocking the secrets
of our socialization within
(capitalist) patriarchy.
particularly the genre of
01 melodrama, reflects
02 patriarchal ideology and
constructs women in
specific ways.

03

Psychoanalysis can help explain the needs, desires, and male-female positionings that are reflected
in film  based on patriarchal unconscious
The Link Between Patriarchy and
Oedipus
● Oedipal themes occur at historical moments
when the human family is structured in specific
ways.
● Nineteenth century familial organization
(producing Oedipal traumas) created desires
and needs that are reflected in film.
● Film and psychoanalysis are linked to the
moment of bourgeois capitalism and support
the status quo.
 Using Psychoanalysis to raise questions
Psychoanalysis has been oppressive to women  why? and How?  we need to
know exactly how psychoanalysis has functioned to repress what we could
potentially become.
We need to raise a number of questions

Is the gaze necessarily male?

Could we structure things so that women own the gaze?

If this were possible, would women want to own the gaze?

Finally, in either case, what does it mean to be a female spectator?

 Using Psychoanalysis to raise questions
Only through asking such questions within the psychoanalytic framework
can we begin to find the gaps and fissures through which we can insert
woman in a historical discourse that has hitherto been male-dominated and
has excluded women.

In this way, we may begin to change ourselves as a first step toward changing
society.
It enables us to see clearly the patriarchal myths through which we have been
positioned as Other (enigma, mystery), and as eternal and unchanging.
Using Psychoanalysis to Deconstruct Hollywood
Films

● Family melodrama  meant specifically for women

 functions both to expose the constraints and limitations that
the capitalist nuclear family imposes on women  conditions
them to accept these as natural and given
 is explicitly concerned with Oedipal issues
 compensates for whatever is excluded from the dominant
Hollywood genres
Peter Brooks’ framework  western and gangster films placed
man within the larger cosmic scene

He points out that we are now in a period when “mythmaking

[can] only be personal and individual” since we lack “a clear
transcendent value to be reconciled to”  so that even these
genres, broadly speaking, fall into melodrama.

Women are only central in and for melodrama and are excluded
from other genres.
At the end of his book Brooks links
psychoanalysis with melodrama. Melodrama is
concerned with

Mulvey
The melodramatic form deals with “the
processes of repression and the status of Oedipal issues.
repressed content.”

s M
y si el
l od Melodrama is a female form.
ana ra
o m A corrective to the main genres that
y ch a
celebrate male action.
Ps

Melodrama  brings ideological

contradictions to the surface
 made for a female audience
Brooks and Freud
 But events are never reconciled at the
end in ways beneficial to women.
Why is it that women are
drawn to melodrama? Why Psychoanalysis can help to explain
do we find our
objectification and
surrender pleasurable? Girl’s Oedipal Crisis

Leads to masochism
 Reflects as a tendency in women to be passive in
Masochism
sexual relations

In Myth
Do
the woman places herself as either passive recipient of male mi
na
desire or, at one remove, as watching a woman who is nc
in e-
passive recipient of male desires and sexual actions. ne Pat Subm
ar l
y a t er n i ss i o
ll f n
an
ta s
Nancy Friday’s discourse on the level of dream i es

Though not with scientific evidence, but shows narratives in which the woman
speaker largely arranges events for her sexual pleasure so that things are
done to her.
 women occupy both positions, the dreamer excited
In Lesbian Fantasies either by dominating another woman, forcing her to
have sex, or enjoying being so dominated.

the female positioning is not as OR women occupy the “male” position

monolithic as critics often imply when they become dominant.

the prevalence of the dominance–submission pattern as a sexual turn-

on is clear
 How it is that certain things turn us on?
How sexuality has been constructed in patriarchy to produce pleasure in
the dominance–submission forms?

Many of the male fantasies in Friday’s book Men in Love show the speaker
constructing events so that he is in control: again, the “I” of identity remains central,
as it is not in the female narrations.
Many male fantasies focus on the man’s excitement in arranging for his woman to
expose herself (or even give herself) to other men, while he watches.

The woman does not own the desire, even when she watches; her watching is to
place responsibility for sexuality at yet one more remove, to distance herself from sex.

The man, on the other hand, owns the desire and the woman, and gets pleasure from
exchanging the woman, as in Lévi-Strauss’s kinship system.
 Some of the fantasies in Friday’s book show men’s wish to be taken over
by an aggressive woman  like the little boy in his mother’s hands

Young boys (but sometimes men) seduced by women in a form of authority –

governesses, nursemaids, nurses, schoolteachers, stepmothers, etc.

Two things emerge here:

1. Dominance– 2. Men have a far wider range of positions available:

submission patterns are
apparently a crucial part
of both male and female
sexuality as constructed
in western civilization.
more readily both dominant and submissive, they
vacillate between supreme control and supreme
abandonment.
Women, meanwhile, are more consistently
submissive, but not excessively abandoned.
In their own fantasies, women do not position
themselves as exchanging men, although a man
might find being exchanged an exciting fantasy.
 Mary Ann Doane has shown that melodrama constructs a female spectator,
where the spectator is made to participate in what is essentially a
masochistic fantasy.

She distinguishing the way a common masochistic fantasy works out for boys
and for girls

1. In Male Fantasy 2. In Female Fantasy

“sexuality remains on the A. desexualized and

surface” and the man “retains
his own role and his own
gratification in the context of
the scenario. The ‘I’ of identity
remains.”
B. “necessitates the woman’s assumption of
the position of spectator, outside of the event.”
In this way, the girl manages, as Freud says,
“to escape from the demands of the erotic side
of her life altogether.”
But the important question remains:
• When women are in the dominant position, are they in the
masculine position?
• Can we envisage a female dominant position that would differ
qualitatively from the male form of dominance?
• Or is there merely the possibility of both sex genders occupying the
positions we now know as “masculine” and “feminine?”
The experience of films of the 1970s and 1980s would support the
latter possibility  Reason for feminists disappointment with the so-
called “liberated” women on screen and presence of male stars for
“female gaze”

When the man steps out of his traditional role as the

one who controls the whole action, and when he is
set up as sex object, the woman then takes on the
“masculine” role as bearer of the gaze and initiator of
the action.
She nearly always loses her traditionally feminine
characteristics in so doing – not those of
attractiveness, but rather of kindness, humaneness,
motherliness.
My Brilliant Career

As female, her desire has no power.

Men’s desire naturally carries power with it, so that when the hero
finally concedes his love for her, he comes to get her. However, being
able to conceive of “love” only as “submission,” an end to autonomy
and to her life as a creative writer, the heroine now refuses him.

Our culture is deeply committed to myths of demarcated sex

differences, called “masculine” and “feminine,” which in turn revolve
first on a complex gaze apparatus and second on dominance-
submission patterns.
However, as a result of the recent women’s movement, women have
been permitted in representation to assume (step into) the position
defined as “masculine,” as long as the man then steps into her
position, thus keeping the whole structure intact.
The exchange  easy to show on screen but in reality very difficult
and fraught with immense psychological difficulties

Such “exchanges” do not do much for either sex, since nothing has
essentially changed: the roles remain locked into their static
boundaries. Showing images of mere reversal may in fact provide a
safety valve for the social tensions that the women’s movement has
created by demanding a more dominant role for women.
The gaze is not Dominant, Hollywood
necessarily male cinema, feminist film
(literally), but to own 01 critics show, is
and activate the gaze, constructed according to
given our language 02 the unconscious of
and the structure of the patriarchy.
unconscious, is to be in
the “masculine”
position.
03

Women in film thus do not function as signifiers for a signified (a real woman), but
signifier and signified have been elided into a sign that represents something in the
male unconscious.
 Unconscious of Patriarchy  Male Spectators  Voyeurism and Fetishism

Eroticization of women on the screen is structured around 3 male gazes:

Camera, Audience and Characters

Due to this eroticization two elements are reflected:

1. Men do not simply look but 2. The sexualization and objectification of

their gaze carries with it the
power of action and
possession which is lacking in
female gaze.
Women cannot act upon the
gaze.
women is not simply for the purposes of
eroticism; from a psychoanalytic point of view,
it is designed to annihilate the threat that
woman (as castrated and possessing a
sinister genital organ) poses.
Karen Horney
Even man’s glorification of
women “has its source not
only in his cravings for
love, but also in his desire
to conceal his dread”.
The basis of the dread of
women not only in
castration (more related to
the father) but in fear of the
vagina.
But psychoanalysts agree that, for whatever reason
– fear of castration (Freud) or in an attempt to deny
the existence of the sinister female genital
(Horney), men endeavour to find the penis in
women  fetishism
Claire Johnston: Either glorification or
disparagement
both mechanisms result in woman not
being presented qua woman at all.
Opposition is between male-non-male
 Discussion on Possibilities for Change
Some women voiced their
displeasure with theories
that were themselves
originally devised by men
like Freud and Lacan
 Julia LeSage, Ruby
Rich
Judith Mayne
Moving beyond the preoccupation with how women
have been constructed in patriarchal cinema
“The task of criticism is to examine the processes
that determine how films evoke responses and how
spectators produce them.”
By forcing our gaze to dwell on the images by
slowing down or stopping the projection that
creates patriarchal voyeurism, we may be able to
provide a “reading against the grain” that will give
us information about our positioning as spectators.
Discussion on Possibilities for Change

Lucy Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca

Criticized feminist film theory and feminist films as
they “focus more on denying men their cathexis with
women as erotic objects than in connecting women
with each other.”

an example of strong women, who care

for one another, providing a model we
need
 Discussion on Possibilities for Change

Kaplan
The film constructs Monroe and Russell as “to-be-looked-at,”
and their manipulations end up as merely comic, since
“capturing” the men involves their “being captured.”
The men’s weakness does not mitigate their narrative power,
and the women are left merely with the limited control they can
wield through their sexuality. The images of Monroe show her
fetishized placement, aimed at reducing her sexual threat,
while Russell’s stance becomes a parody of the male position.
The result is that the two women repeat, in exaggerated form,
dominant gender stereotypes.

Arbuthnot and Seneca’s analysis ignores the way all dominant images are
basically male constructs.
 Discussion on Possibilities for Change

Julia Kristeva and others

It is impossible to know what the “feminine” might be, outside of male constructs.

Sandy Flitterman and Judith Barry

Feminist artists must avoid claiming a specific female power residing in the body
of women and representing “an inherent feminine artistic essence which could
find expression if allowed to be explored freely.”
It results in Motherhood being redefined as the seat of female creativity, while
women “are proposed as the bearers of culture, albeit an alternative one.”

They suggest that “A radical feminist art would include an understanding of how
women are constituted through social practices in culture” and argue for “an
aesthetics designed to subvert the production of ‘woman’ as commodity,” much
as Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey had earlier stated that to be feminist a
cinema had to be a counter-cinema.
 Counter-cinema or Avant-Garde: An Alternative?

Should Arbuthnot and Seneca

we Our fascination is with Hollywood films, rather than with, avant-
destroy garde films, because they bring us pleasure; but we have
pleasure (rightly) been wary of admitting the degree to which the pleasure
? comes from identification with objectification.

Taking Hollywood images out of Christian Metz, Stephen Heath, and

the context of the total structure in
which they appear, will not get us
very far  one needs to take
recourse to psychoanalysis to
understand how it works.
others have shown that the processes of
cinema mimic in many ways those of the
unconscious. If psychoanalysis is a tool
that will unlock the meaning of dreams, it
should also unlock that of films.
Mulvey  confronted, with her film, the repression of mothering in patriarchal culture.
Her film Riddles of the Sphinx argued that women live in a society ruled by the father,
in which the place of the mother is repressed.
The mother-child exchange should be read from a mother’s point of view.

The entire construction of woman

in patriarchy as a lack could be The focus on women as simply sex
viewed as emerging from the object that we have been tracing
need to repress mothering and through Hollywood films, may be part
the painful memory traces it has of the apparatus that represses
left in the man. The phallus as mothering.
signified can be set in motion only
given the other with a lack, and
this has resulted in the male focus
on castration.
This is not any essentialization and does not idealizes motherhood as expressing
female specificity.
But that motherhood is one of the areas that has been left vague, allowing us to
reformulate the position as given, rather than discovering a specificity outside the
system as we are in.

Motherhood could be thought of within psychoanalysis in the following manner:

1. Just as men fetishize women in order to reduce their threat, so women fetishize
the child, looking in the child for the phallus to ‘make up’ for castration.
2. Narcissistic  in the sense of finding the self in the child, extension of their own
egos
3. Since the law represses mothering, a gap is left through which it may be possible
to subvert patriarchy.
Challenge  how to express motherhood after the period of the imaginary?
Women are faced with an impossible dilemma: to remain in blissful unity with the
child in the imaginary or to enter the symbolic in which mothering is repressed,
cannot represent a position of power.

New understanding of mothering

 With feminist films
 Single mothers  new psychic patterns are evolving
 Cultures other than capitalistic ones and western ones

Everything revolves around pleasure and pleasure has been defined in such a
negative light that we have forgotten the mutual, pleasurable bonding we all male
and female enjoyed with our mothers.
Some studies show that the gaze is first set in motion in the mother-child relationship
 mutual gazing and not the dominant-submissive one.
 Conclusion

We should move beyond long-held cultural and linguistic

patterns of oppositions.

If rigidly defined sex differences have been constructed

around fear of the other, we need to think about ways of
transcending a polarity that has only brought us all pain.