Saturday, 10 March 2012

Freudian theorys in Feminist Film Theory

The Oedipal complex is a term used by Sigmund Freud in his theory of psychosexual stages of development to describe a boy's unconcious feelings of desire for his mother and jealously and anger towards his father. Essentially, a boy feels like he is in competition with his father for possession of his mother. He views his father as a rival for her attentions and affections. The Oedipal complex is used in Feminist Film Theory to "prove" how women are seen as objects/possession in film to be either desired or as the "bad guy". However there is no way to prove that boys/men unconciously feel these things towards their parents and veiw their mothers as a possession so this theory is unscientific.

"The unconscious mechanism that I will focus on here is that of fetishism.
psychoanalyzing the fetishist's unconscious.
child feeling terrified by his mother's apparently literal castration, it is
difference. Later he will consciouslycome to accept sexual difference, but
belong." -

audience, and the discourse of a given film.

  1. . The Filmmaker's Unconscious. In its earliest stages, psychoanalytic film
    manifestations of a patient's unconscious, films were considered to be
    manifestations of a filmmaker's unconscious. This kind of psychoanalytic film
    theory is somewhat out of fashion today.
    immediately attacked by skeptical film critics who pointed out that fictional
    quickly found new credibility with the next stage in the development of
    prompted and shaped during a film viewing.
    interpreted as manifestations of our unconscious, insofar as we come to
    unconsciously project our own fantasies, phobias, and fixations onto these
    derive unconscious satisfaction or dissatisfaction accordingly.
    of psychoanalytic film theory more or less abandons the character-centered
    mimics the formal model of the conscious/unconscious mind posited by
    Suddenly Last Summer). Here the unconscious that is unveiled belongs
    film-viewing situation).

So psychoanalytic film theory unmasks the psychic mechanisms functioning in
instances of cinematic discourse." -

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