Cinema Suffering And Psychoanalysis

Cinema, Suffering and Psychoanalysis explores psychological disorder as common to the human condition using a unique three-angled approach: psychoanalysis recognises the inherent suffering encountered by each subject due to developmental phases; psychology applies specific categorisation to how this suffering manifests; cinema depicts suffering through a combination of video and aural elements. Functioning as a culturally reflexive medium, the six feature films analysed, including Black Swan (2010) and The Machinist (2004), represent some of the most common psychological disorders and lived experiences of the contemporary era. This book enters unchartered terrain in cinema scholarship by combining clinical psychology's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Five (DSM-V) to organise and diagnose each character, and psychoanalysis to track the origin, mechanism and affect of the psychological disorder within the narrative trajectory of each film. Lacan's theories on the infantile mirror phase, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, Žižek's theories on the Real, the big Other and the Event, and Kristeva's theories on abjection and melancholia work in combination with the DSM's classification of symptoms to interpret six contemporary pieces of cinema. By taking into consideration that origin, mechanism, affect and symptomatology are part of an interconnected group, this book explores psychological disorder as part of the human condition, something which contributes to and informs personal identity. More specifically, this research refutes the notion that psychological disorder and psychological health exist as a binary, instead recognising that what has traditionally been pathologised, may instead be viewed as variations on human identity.

"An investigation of psychological disorders through several key cinematic texts, pulling together dialectically opposed methodologies of psychoanalysis and modern psychology"--

These fifteen carefully chosen essays by well-known scholars demonstrate the vitality and variety of psychoanalytic film criticism, as well as the crucial role feminist theory has played in its development. Among the films discussed are Duel in the Sun, The Best Years of Our Lives, Three Faces of Eve, Tender is the Night, Pandora's Box, Secrets of the Soul, and the works of Jacques Tourneur (director of The Cat People and other features).

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This study explores the model derived from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, via Marxism and semiotics, of looking at film. It retraces the steps of film theory from ideological criticism of the late ‘60s to spectator studies in 1988 when the book was originally published. Psychoanalysis enables a discussion of the cinema’s role as a social and political force and this book enters a discourse of the politics of representation. Reconstructing discussion of basic issues, the book addresses our instincts and defences in reacting to cinema, the similarity between mental processes and cinematic technique, narrative techniques and the ‘cinematic apparatus’. Importantly, the book concerns itself with the concept of ideology and how the filmviewing experience engages the spectator in a complex net of stimuli presenting representations of an ideal world and the effect of this within film studies.

Psychoanalytic theory has been the subject of attacks from philosophers, cultural critics and scientists who have questioned the cogency of its reasoning as well as the soundness of its premises. Nevertheless, when used to shed light on horror cinema, psychoanalysis in its various forms has proven to be a fruitful and provocative interpretative tool. This volume seeks to find the proper place of psychoanalytic thought in critical discussion of cinema in a series of essays that debate its legitimacy, utility and validity as applied to the horror genre. It distinguishes itself from previous work in this area through the self-consciousness with which psychoanalytic concepts are employed and the theorization that coexists with interpretations of particular horror films and subgenres.

Since it first appeared in Screen in 1975, Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" has been an enduring point of reference for artists, filmmakers, writers and theorists. Mulvey's compelling polemical analysis of visual pleasure has provoked and encouraged others to take positions, challenge preconceived ideas and produce new works that owe their possibility to the generative qualities of this key essay. In this book, the celebrated New York-based video artist Rachel Rose (born 1986) has produced an innovative work that extends and adds to the essay's frame of reference. Drawing on 18th- and 19th-century fairy tales, and observing how their flat narratives matched the flatness of their depictions, Rose created collages that connect these pre-cinematic illustrations to what Mulvey describes in her essay--cinema flattening sexuality into visuality.

Through the development of psychoanalytically informed film interpretation, Andreas Hamburger provides new insights into the experience of watching films and their influence upon our internal lives. Building upon a relational understanding of psychoanalysis, this volume develops a methodical procedure for psychoanalytical film interpretation, discusses individual aspects of the medium – such as editing, spatial and temporal design – and puts approaches to film psychoanalysis and cinema theory into a systematic perspective. Hamburger exemplifies his arguments in a detailed analysis of numerous film examples and demonstrates how an in-depth encounter with the medium can provoke new and surprising understandings. Providing an interdisciplinary perspective that crosses the study of popular culture with psychoanalytic theory, this book will be required reading not only for students and scholars of film, but also for psychoanalysts in practice and training.