Psychoanalysis and the Cinema Essays - Freudian Psychology

Psychoanalysis and the Cinema Essays - Freudian Psychology Psychoanalysis and the Cinema Metz 3 Reduced to its most fundamental procedures, any psychoanalytic reflection on the cinema might be defined in Lacanian terms as an attempt to disengage the cinema-object from the imaginary and to win it for the symbolic, in the hope of extending the latter by a new province: an enterprise of displacement, a territorial enterprise, a symbolising advance; that is to say, in the field of films as in other fields, the psychoanalytic itinerary is from the outset a semiological one, even (above all) if in comparison with the discourse of a more classical semiology it shifts its point of focus from the statement to the enunciation. 7 The institution is outside us and inside us, indistinctly collective and intimate, sociological and psychoanalytic, just as the general prohibition of incest has as its individual corollary the Oedipus complex, castration or perhaps in other states of society different physical configurations, but ones which still imprint the institution in us in their own way. 17 What contribution can Freudian psychoanalysis make to the study of the cinematic signifier?