Psychoanalytic Film Theory

 

 

Psychoanalytic film theory is a school of academic film criticism developed by Christian Metz, based on Freudian psychology and Jacques Lacan's mirror stage. It analyses how watching a film reconstructs the psyche of the spectator.

 

Paging Dr. Freud... 

 

Dr. Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist, often credited as the father of psychology. Freudian psychology posits that the human psyche is composed of the id, ego, and superego, and the interactions of these three constructs determined the behavior of the human.

 

The id comprises the basic, instinctual drives, such as hunger, lust and fear. It acts according to the "pleasure principle", meaning that every wishful impulse should be satisfied immediately, regardless of consequence. With the id alone, humankind is essentially no different from any animal. Freud described the id as having two instincts that are opposites, yet equally present: the life instinct and death instinct. The life instinct is the desire to create organic life via procreation while the death instinct mirrored the life instinct by being a desire to send organic life back into death. 

 

The superego essentially acts as the person's critical and moralizing conscience, incoporating the values and morals as established by society. While the id desires simple self-gratification, the superego desires for the person's behavior to be based on what is socially acceptable. It criticizes the id's desires and controls the person's morality and sense of right and wrong. 

 

The ego is construct that most closely resembles an actual human mind. It is the organized part of the consciousness and organizes the rest of the psyche into something coherent and productive. While the id acts based on the "pleasure principle", the ego acts on the "reality principle", or the need to reconcile the primal urges of the id with societal demands for appropriate behavior. Freud thought of the ego as the middleman between the id and the superego, taking the id's self-gratification and organizing it in a way that complies with both the superego's demands and the conditions of the real world, with the superego punishing the ego with feelings of guilt, anxiety, or inferiority if the ego acts out of line. The ego is therefore said to be driven by the id and confined by the superego.

 

Dr. Freud isn't in. Please refer to his student, Mr. Lacan.

 

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist whose ideas had significant impact on multiple schools of thought, including but not limited to clinical psychoanalysis, film theory and sociology. Many, if not most of his works revolve around revisiting and rethinking Freudian psychology, particularly the concept of the ego. His first offical contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage, or how the infant's "ego comes into being through the infant's identification with an image of its own body" (Flitterman-Lewis, 1987). 

 

Put simply, between the ages of six and eighteen months, the infant has no ego and merely "perceives itself as a mass of disconnected, fragmentary movements" (Flitterman-Lewis, 1987). When the infant first sees its image in the form of a reflection or another person's face, it regards the image as unified, coherent and therefore superior self. It thus identifies with the image and internalizes it as the "ideal ego". By striving to achieve that "ideal ego", the infant thus forms its own ego. This inital formation of the ego is known as primary identification. 

 

Wait, you're a film student? This is the psychology faculty, moron! Go look for Mr. Metz at film.

 

Christian Metz was a French film theorist who first applied psychoanalytic theories to film studies, creating the framework known as psychoanalytic film theory.