ENGL 6310/7310 Popular Culture Studies Fall 2011 PH 300 M 240-540 Dr. David Lavery

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). French psychoanalyst and cultural theorist. Psychoanalysis

Laura Mulvey (1941- ). British filmmaker and film theorist. Psychoanalysis

Slavoj Žižek (1949- ). Slovenian philosopher, critic, and cultural theorist. Psychoanalysis

Anality For Freud, an adult obsession with order and acquisition that is in fact an attempt to reacquire the body’s first excremental products and overcome its limitations. According to Becker, anality is simply the fear of having a body. Psychoanalysis

Archetypes “a very typical example of a certain person or thing : the book is a perfect archetype of the genre. • an original that has been imitated : the archetype of faith is Abraham. • a recurrent symbol or motif in literature, art, or mythology : mythological archetypes of good and evil. • Psychoanalysis (in Jungian psychology) a primitive mental image inherited from the earliest human ancestors, and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious.”—Oxford New American Dictionary Psychoanalysis

Collective Unconscious For Jung, the transpersonal mind in which all individual minds archetypally participate. The source of both mythology and dreams. Psychoanalysis

Ego That aspect of the psyche’s tripartite structure (id, ego, superego) that interacts with reality. The ground floor of the psyche. Psychoanalysis

The Gaze Laura Mulvey’s hypothesis “that the cinematic apparatus of classical Hollywood cinema inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position, with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire. In the era of classical Hollywood cinema, viewers were encouraged to identify with the protagonist of the film, who tended to be a man. Meanwhile, Hollywood female characters of the 1950s and 60s were, according to Mulvey, coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness." Mulvey suggests that there were two distinct modes of the male gaze of this era: "voyeuristic" (i.e. seeing women as 'whores') and "fetishistic" (i.e. seeing women as 'madonnas').” “Mulvey argued that the only way to annihilate the "patriarchal" Hollywood system was to radically challenge and re-shape the filmic strategies of classical Hollywood with alternative feminist methods. She called for a new feminist avant-garde filmmaking that would rupture the magic and pleasure of classical Hollywood filmmaking. “—”Laura Mulvey” in Wikipedia Psychoanalysis

Id The animalistic aspect of the psyche’s tripartite (id, ego, superego). Ruled by the pleasure principle. Psychoanalysis

The Imaginary Psychoanalysis Lacan's replacement for what is ordinarily called "subjectivity," a word whose normal connotations he sought to avoid, seeking instead to remind that subjectivity is not innate but must be created, beginning in the mirror stage. “The basis of the Imaginary order is the formation of the ego in the "mirror stage"; by articulating the ego in this way 'the category of the imaginary provides the theoretical basis for a long-standing polemic against ego-psychology'[5] on Lacan's part. Since the ego is formed by identifying with the counterpart or specular image, "identification" is an important aspect of the imaginary. The relationship whereby the ego is constituted by identification is a locus of "alienation", which is another feature of the imaginary, and is fundamentally narcissistic: thus Lacan wrote of 'the different phases of imaginary, narcissistic, specular identification - the three adjectives are equivalent'[6] - which make up the ego's history. If 'the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real are an unholy trinity whose members could as easily be called Fraud, Absence and Impossibility'[7], then the Imaginary, a realm of surface appearances which are inherently deceptive, is Fraud.”--Wikipedia Psychoanalysis

Individuation For Jung, the psychological process of becoming unique, whole, adult. Psychoanalysis

Projection Placing on external events and individuals the psychological struggles which transpire within. Psychoanalysis

The Mirror Stage Psychoanalysis “The mirror stage is a concept in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. Philosopher Raymond Tallis[1] describes the mirror stage as ‘the cornerstone of Lacan’s oeuvre.’ Initially, Lacan proposed that the mirror stage was part of an infant's development, as outlined in his first and only[2] official contribution to larger psychoanalytic theory at the Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad in 1936. By the early 1950s, Lacan's concept of the mirror stage had evolved: he no longer considered the mirror stage as a moment in the life of the infant, but as representing a permanent structure of subjectivity, or as the paradigm of ‘Imaginary order’. Lacanian psychoanalysis, including the mirror stage, has had little to no influence on clinical psychology in the English-speaking world, where his ideas are best-known as methods of literary analysis in literary theory. [3]”--Wikipedia Psychoanalysis

Lacan hypothesized that a child's early recognition (between six and eighteen months) of his/her image--and hence of his/her body--in a mirror produces ambivalent feelings of attraction (because it is an ideal image) and repulsion (because the real can never be the ideal). The child fantasizes its body as whole, as unified--just like that of the (usually ever-present) mother. (Often, when the primal scene before the mirror takes place, the child is in the mother's arms.) In this magical moment, Lacan believed, the child sees all those parts--fingers and toes and ears and nose and legs--of a body about which previous knowledge had been only partial united, as constituting one body, as constituting somebody. The "apprehension of unity," one Lacanian [Colin McCabe] points out, is "all the more surprising in that it normally occurs before motor control has ensured that unity in practice." For it may come before the child can even walk or before toilet training has been accomplished. Psychoanalysis

“Demand re-presents needs that are originally biological but that the child cannot satisfy alone. Because the child must respond to the desire of the Other that he learn to speak . . . . these needs eventually will be translated into words. Words transform a biological relationship into a human one but the inadequacy of language either to represent the I who speaks or to define relationships leads to the paradox of an unconscious desire that is known (analogically), but that cannot be expressed (in digital forms) The child’s first appeal to the Other is by crying. A particular Other will satisfy a need, such as hunger, but cannot satisfy the demand. For what is the message that crying translates? Even though we all know what it is, it is impossible to say. But it is always possible to say something; this something is a metaphor for the inexpressible desire created by the inability of language to express all that has to be said. . . . Speech or discourse thus flows in chain upon metonymic chain of connected words in an impossible attempt to fill up the hole in being created by language itself.”--Anthony Wilden (paraphrasing Jacques Lacan) Psychoanalysis

Penis Envy For Freud, the sense of inadequacy felt by women upon discovery of genital difference. Female castration anxiety. Psychoanalysis

Pleasure Principle For Freud, the simply biological, sensual needs that govern the psyche under the rule of the id. Psychoanalysis

Polymorphous Perversity For Freud, complete commitment—as in children—to the pleasure principle. Psychoanalysis

Reality Principle For Freud, the “real world,” with all its limitations, to which a healthy adult accommodates himself/herself after overcoming immersion in the principle. Psychoanalysis

Repression For Freud, the process of putting out of mind, supressing into the unconscious events/memories/experiences too difficult to remain conscious of. Psychoanalysis

Scopophilia Psychiatry .the obtaining of sexual pleasure by looking at nude bodies, erotic photographs, etc.—Dictionary.com Psychoanalysis

Sublimation A psychological process in which the unsatisfied needs of one aspects of the psyche are converted/transformed into other more easily satisfied psychic needs. For example, sexual desire can be sublimated into work. Psychoanalysis

Superego The boss, the parent of the psyche in Freud’s conception, the force that imposes on the seemingly ungovernable id the rules and regulations of society and demands compliance with the reality principle. Psychoanalysis

The Symbolic By the symbolic, Lacan meant all systems of signification-most prominently among them language iitself-which place the human being outside of him or herself in the social-in those nets of relationship which enable the infant to function in a world of others. Psychoanalysis