July 24th: Psychoanalysis

How to Approach Psychoanalytic Theory

Psychoanalysis is a vast, complicated subject (like postmodernism) with contradictions, passé ideas, new ideas, more contradictions, a few reclamations, and hardly any definitive definitions. In no way should you consider our discussions as the end of the road or final say in the study of psychoanalysis. In fact, it's but one of several possible beginnings.

I will have us mainly focus on the study of the unconscious and how it relates to cultural studies. Ever heard of the collective unconscious? How about the collective conscious?

Three Important Terms to Consider

• Id: the unconscious, unorganized part of one's personality; often accessible through dreams.*

• Ego: (overly simplified definition) the conscious part of one's personality. From Freud: "The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions" (p. 25).

• Super-ego: the mainly conscious conscience of one's personality that embodies ideals, goals, and confidence; it also prohibits drives, fantasies, feelings, and actions; is an internalization of culture and cultural norms.

The above three Freudian terms have a rather complex relationship to one another and their supposed development is also quite difficult to describe. However, for our purposes, what do the three suggest about a person's relationship to others? What is the cultural significance of these personality components? What do they have to offer an analysis on new media?

Mulvey's Article on Scopophilic Fetishization (she uses an 's' instead of a 'z')

Mulvey uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to describe what goes on for a spectator, an audience. She focuses on film, but the theory can easily be applied to other media (or can/should it?). Mulvey offers a feminist critique of how women are portrayed in film and what those portrayals mean for the male spectators. A few basic things to come away with from Mulvey are the following:

• Mulvey is "demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film" (I. A. para 1).

• Hollywood narratives, films and the myths that "inspire" those films, predominantly reflect the male gaze--what men desire to see (scopophilia).

• The scopophilic aspect of viewing cinema "arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight" (Mulvey, II. C. para 1).

• The identification aspect of viewing cinema "develop[s] through narcissism and the constitution of the ego" it "comes from identification with the image seen" (Mulvey, II. C. para 1).

• "A male movie star's glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror" (Mulvey, III. B. para 1).

• Men viewing the female icon or celebrity--possibly in so-called "chick flicks"--poses a different psychoanalytic solution. The male unconscious, when confronted with a female icon, does not (in heterosexist circles) identify with her; she doesn't complete him. Instead,

  • Voyeurism with associations of sadism and controlling the figure--woman as the object (Mulvey, III. C.1 para 2).
    -or-

  • "Fetishitic scopophilia builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself" (Mulvey, III. C.1 para 2).

• Cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire" (Mulvey, III. "Summary" para 1).

• Mulvey argues that film is another cultural product that controls images of women "to circumvent her threat" (III. "Summary" para 1).

But what can we say about women in the audience? With whom do they identify? What about women like Angelina Jolie or Milla Jovovich?

Hollywood is often called the Dream Factory. Why?

How can we relate this back to our favorite subject...consumption?

Could Dr. Seuss Really have Meant That???

Some might say LeBeau is being a bit facetious in his psychoanalytic reading of The Cat in the Hat. But psychoanalysis is all about the unconscious: artists and such create texts based on their experiences in life. Regardless of how much one may protest, we are all part of society and the influence can be read through our creations--books, films, technologies, etc.

Although there may be some disagreement, psychoanalysis can help us approach texts to uncover ideologies that influence both creators (artists, authors, architects, etc.) and audiences.

There's even a video!

If we have time, how about ruining another children's text--Lady and the Trampor The Little Mermaid...

Cowlishaw's "Playing War"

Besides immediately pointing out that the video game industry makes more money than the motion picture industry, Cowlishaw critiques the idea of "realism" in video games. Many people point out (gamers, designers, critics) that certain games are "realistic," but, when it comes to war games, that simply isn't true:

• Respawning: "Death tends to be final--but not in war video games" (para. 8).

• "Like wartime press reports, war video games carefully elide this most basic fact of wartime: bodily damage" (para. 11).

• Gamers are in "no actual danger of being killed, or physically harmed beyond getting stiff and fat from playing video games too long" (para. 12).

• Newer video games only seem realistic or real because "the genealogical relationship makes newer war games seem more realistic than they are" (para. 15).

• simulacrum: similarity, likeness; in postmodern theory it refers to a copy or simulation of an item, event, or idea for which the original referent (the reality or real thing) does not exist.

• Excerpt from an article on a video gamer:
  Brent’s penchant for first-person shooters suggests that he enjoys embodying the avatar’s persona: As the helicopter “gunner” in Battlefield Vietnam (Electronic Arts), Brent is in an Army attack chopper firing on the Vietcong listening to Creedance Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” and the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”—two popular songs from the Vietnam Era. Brent was never in Vietnam, but the music and his sense of attacking the VC from a software-engineered helicopter helps him better incorporate the soldier’s persona from representations he has seen in films such as Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), popular war movies he watches. The video game is a synecdoche of experience and a simulacrum at best. Unlike real war, Brent’s only risk is temporary eye strain and not serious injury or death—he is engaged in a fictional world. Juul (2005) points out that “games project fictional worlds through a variety of different means, but the fictional worlds are imagined by the player, and the player fills in any gaps in the fictional world” (p. 121). What makes the video game a figured world is that the world of the helicopter gunner is simulated via the video game’s programming and accepted by gamers who enter the “text” for this virtual experience. Like Brent’s situation above regarding what it feels like to be in Vietnam, a gamer’s interpretations come from other sources—culture. Video games (and gamers) are products of the culture(s) from which they come, and we can read the culture—its values, fears, and “history”—in video games.
  Toscano, A. A. (2011). "Enacting Culture in Gaming: A Video Gamer’s Literacy Experiences and Practices." Current Issues in Education, 14(1): p. 17. Retrieved from http://cie.asu.edu/

Coming Up

I have prompts for tomorrow's hybrid activity up on moodle, and there is some information about tomorrow's readings: July 25th's page. Also, I have notes for Monday's (7/29) readings up. Butler's piece is a difficult read, so be prepared.

I'll have comments and grades on your Critical Analysis of a Technology essay returned (via moodle) by tomorrow--Friday at the latest. Don't forget your Critical Media Analysis is due on Monday (7/29). I have some discussion about this on Monday's (7/22) page--let's check it out.

Terms for Discussion

• Compensation: taking up one behavior [may be embodied in an object] because one cannot accomplish another behavior [often a behavior considered normal].

• Confabulation: in psychology it means to replace fact with fantasy unconsciously in memory.

• Displacement: An unconscious defense mechanism, whereby the mind redirects emotion from a ‘dangerous’ object to a ‘safe’ object. In psychoanalytic theory, displacement is a defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening target; redirecting emotion (or, perhaps, action) to a safer outlet.

• Identification: the act of seeing oneself as similar to or (rarely) identical to another person or object. Often the process of identification completes a subject as when one sees himself or herself represented in another figure (a parent, friend, celebrity, avatar, etc.).

• Manque à être: (via Lacanian psychoanalytic theory) literally, "the want to be"; we're born into the experience of lack, and our history consists of a series of attempts to figure and overcome this lack, a project doomed to failure" (Lapsley and Westlake 67).

• Scopophilia: "taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze" (Mulvey, 1975, II. A. para. 1). Similar to voyeurism.

• Transference: unconscious redirection of feelings for one person to another.

Works Cited

Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. (4th ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2007.

Cowlishaw, Brian. “Playing War: The Emerging Trend of Real Virtual Combat in Video Games.” American Popular Culture Online Magazine. January 2005.

Freud, Sigmund. Freud, The Ego and the Id. 1923.

Juul, J. (2005). Half-real: Video games between real rules and fictional worlds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Lapsley, Robert and Westlake, Michael. Film Theory: An Introduction. 2nd Ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006 (1st edition published in 1998).

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, 16.3 (1975): 6-18.

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