1. Psychoanalysis & Subjectivity
Article By : Mandy Merck
Powerpoint By : Sianna Byrne

2. Outline: Aims / Guide Questions (3 minutes)
Review of Lacan (5 minutes)
Importance of Psychoanalysis (7 minutes)
Other opinions (8 minutes)
Question & Answer (2 minutes)

3. Guide Questions What is subjectivity?
What are the problems with using Lacanian psychoanalysis to study films?

4. Jacques Lacan
Theory that the subject is constituted in lack and relation to Symbolic order…
Linguistic elements are defined in terms of rule-governed relations, not simply in terms of what they signify.
Phallus (Symbolic) vs. penis (biological)

5. Marnie & Why She Cannot Kill Her Horse

6. Importance of Psychoanalysis
Lacan’s emphasis on language as constituent of gender draws attention to construction of gender representations in film text as a signifying practice.
This also reveals what film text represses due to the dominant beliefs of what is sexually proper.

7. Why We Care 1970s poststructuralist film theory
Emphasis shifted from meaning residing in the text of a film…
Emphasis was placed on the meaning constructed in reading/viewing the text
This included new formal mechanisms:
Suture
Notions of identification
The “male gaze”

8. “Dirty Dancing”?

9. Other Opinions & Criticisms
Abstraction vs. Mechanism
Female spectatorship
Problems with visual approach
Language & Sexual Difference

10. General Criticism
Viewing subject is only a generalized abstraction, without individual history or prejudice.
Defense: Film text imposes formal mechanisms (suture, the gaze) to supercede empirical realities and position the subject.

11. Laura Mulvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen, 1975
Used Lacan to set parameters of the screen-spectator relationship.
Emphasized constructions of gender roles within a phallocentric discourse.
Male = fullness, female = desire/castration
“a world based on sexual imbalance”

12. Stephen Heath Lacan reflects biases of patriarchal society.
Critical of Lacan’s visual justification of female castration.
“any vision, is constructed, not given”
It is an appeal to the natural.
Psychoanalysis understands instability of subjectivity and gender, but still relies on concrete basic phallus inequality.

13. Donald Williamson
Argues that Lacan must refer to phallus as signifier AND organ.
Lacan insists phallus is a signifier of the Symbolic, not the biological…
BUT how does an infant in the Imaginary recognize sexual difference to reach the Symbolic?
Subject’s awareness must be linked with an observation.

14. Question & Answer
Distinction between the phallus and penis was first focused on by ___________.
This resulted in a new focus on the ____-_________ relationship.
T/F: Gender inequalities are all naturally understood.