ENGL 3815 Survey of
Popular Culture
Fall 2013
PH 321
Dr. David Lavery
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). French
psychoanalyst and cultural theorist.
Psychoanalysis
Survey of Popular Culture
Laura Mulvey (1941- ). British
filmmaker and film theorist.
Psychoanalysis
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Slavoj Žižek (1949- ). Slovenian philosopher, critic,
and cultural theorist.
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Survey of Popular Culture
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.
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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
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Collective Unconscious
For Jung, the transpersonal mind in which all individual minds archetypally
participate. The source of both mythology and dreams.
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Ego
That aspect of the psyche’s tripartite structure (id, ego, superego) that
interacts with reality. The ground floor of the psyche.
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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
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Id
The animalistic aspect of the psyche’s tripartite (id, ego, superego). Ruled
by the pleasure principle.
Psychoanalysis
The Imaginary
Survey of Popular Culture
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
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Individuation
For Jung, the psychological process of becoming unique, whole, adult.
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Projection
Placing on external events and individuals the psychological struggles which
transpire within.
Psychoanalysis
The Mirror Stage
Survey of Popular Culture
“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 bestknown 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.
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“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)
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Penis Envy
For Freud, the sense of inadequacy felt by women upon discovery of
genital difference. Female castration anxiety.
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Pleasure Principle
For Freud, the simply biological, sensual needs that govern the
psyche under the rule of the id.
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Polymorphous Perversity
For Freud, complete commitment—as in children—to the pleasure
principle.
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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.
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Repression
For Freud, the process of putting out of mind, supressing into the
unconscious events/memories/experiences too difficult to remain
conscious of.
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Scopophilia
Psychiatry .the obtaining of sexual pleasure by looking at nude bodies,
erotic photographs, etc.—Dictionary.com
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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.
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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.
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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