Lacan's Theory
Lacan's Theory and Revisions of Psychoanalysis Within Relation to Film.
Lacan was a major figure in Parisian intellectual life for a large part of the 20th century, often being referred to as the French Freud; " His teachings and writings explore the significance of Freud's discovery of the unconscious and both within the theory and practice of analysis itself as well as in connection with a wide range of other disciplines." (Adrian Johnston, 2013).
What are Lacan's Key Theories?
The Imaginary- Associated with the restricted spheres of consciousness and self-awareness and relates to what people experience as non-psychoanalytic quotidian reality. What someone "imagines" another person is, what we "imagine" someone means when communicatively interacting, and what we "imagine" ourselves to be. This includes the imagined perspectives of others. Indicates the ways in which the Imaginary "points to core analytic ideas like transference, reality, and the ego. In particular, the Imaginary is central to Lacan's accounts of ego formation." (Adrian Johnston, 2013) The imaginary is dependent on the symbolic.
The Symbolic- This register refers to the laws, institutions, customs, norms, practices and traditions of cultures and societies. The phrase "symbolic order" (Jaques Lacan) can be loosely defined as the objective spirit "this non-natural universe is an elaborate set of inner-subjective and trans-subjective contexts into which individual human beings are thrown at birth" (Adrian Johnston). In the mention of structure in his writings, Lacan is usually referring to the register of the Symbolic, which he conceptualizes is like a language in the phrase "the unconscious is structured"
The Real- "The state of nature from which we have been forever severed by language. Only as neo-natal children were we close to this state of nature, a state in which there is nothing but need."
The Mirror Stage- The proposition that children pass through a phase where an external image of the body (such as in a mirror) produces a psychic response to the mental representation of themselves. The child identifies with the image of themselves, serving as a benchmark for their emerging perceptions of selfhood. The mirror stage establishes the ego as fundamentally dependant on external factors. "As the so-called 'individual' matures and develops, and enters into social situations through language, this 'other' will be elaborated within social and linguistic frameworks that will give each subject's personality its particular characteristics." (Alan Sheridan, 1977)
How do Lacan's Theories Relate to Cinema and Film?
"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." (Paula Murphy, 2005)
The gaze is also a commonly used feature in many films, especially in horror and thriller films in order to convey a sense of self-awareness, anxiety and a feeling of being watched within the audience.
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