New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

IV
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychoanalytic film theory represents a development of—rather than a
departure from—cine-semiotics, for, as Christian Metz points out, “both
linguistic studies and psychoanalytic studies are sciences of the very fact of
meaning, of signification” (Metz 1979:9). Some film theorists saw a
relation between the way that the human psyche (in general) and cinematic
representation (in particular) function, and felt that Freud’s theory of
human subjectivity and unconscious production could shed new light on the
textual processes involved in film-making and viewing. One of the aims,
therefore, of psychoanalytic film theory is a systematic comparison of the
cinema as a specific kind of spectacle and the structure of the socially and
psychically constituted individual. This approach views psychoanalysis as a
general field of investigation, a structuring matrix in which the various
terms and concepts interconnect to provide a framework for elaborating
this relation. For this reason, the discussion of film-specific terms will be
preceded by a brief outline of psychoanalysis.
PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY
Film theory’s use of psychoanalysis is based primarily on French
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s reformulation of Freudian theory, most
notably his emphasis on the relations of desire and subjectivity in discourse
(and it is this emphasis that allows psychoanalysis to be understood as a
social theory). As Rosalind Coward puts it, “The unconscious originates in
the same process by which the individual enters the symbolic universe”
(Coward 1976:8). This means, first, that unconscious processes are
essentially discursive in nature, and second that psychic life is both
individual (private) and collective (social) at the same time. For film
theory, considering the unconscious meant replacing the cinema as an
“object” with the cinema as a “process,” seeing semiotic and narrative film
studies in the light of a general theory of SUBJECT-formation. The term
subject refers to a critical concept related to—but not equivalent with—the
individual, and suggests a whole range of determinations (social, political,
linguistic, ideological, psychological) that intersect to define it. Refusing the