New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY 151
Freud calls disavowal “a process which in the mental life of children seems
neither uncommon nor very dangerous but which in an adult would mean
the beginning of a psychosis” (Freud 1963:188), and maintains that
something can be learned from fetishism about the “splitting of the ego.”
Disavowal, as a response to castration anxiety, is not the reaction to a
simple perception of a certain reality, but to the relation of two symbolic
formations—the recognition of sexual difference and the fear of castration
by the father. Fetishism is a process that allows the simultaneous
interaction of two contradictory meanings, but it is a symbolic process at
the level of the unconscious.
Linking this SPLITTING OF BELIEF to a primordial scenario in the life
of the subject, Metz traces still another relation between cinema viewing
and the unconscious. He says that whether one understands the scenario of
castration as a symbolic drama that becomes a metaphor for all losses,
both real and imaginary (as in Lacan), or takes it more literally (as in
Freud), the process is the same.
Before this unveiling of a lack (we are already close to the
cinematic signifier), the child…will have to double up its belief
(another cinematic characteristic) and from then on forever hold two
contradictory opinions…. In other words, it will, perhaps definitively,
retain its former belief beneath the new ones, but it will also hold to
its new perceptual observation while disavowing it on another level….
Thus is established the lasting matrix, the affective prototype of all
the splittings of belief.
(Metz 1975:68)
These issues have dramatic consequences for feminist criticism. Laura
Mulvey interprets fetishism as one modality in the relationship between the
spectator and the woman’s image, while Jacqueline Rose challenges the
repression of the feminine in this model of belief. Both will be considered
more fully later, but here is a provisional suggestion about women’s
relation to the concept of fetishism. The scenario of fetishism is not about a
real woman who lacks a real penis, but a structure in which symbolic
relations, already constituted as meaningful, are put into play. Looking at
the screen is not like looking at a “castrated” woman, but the structures of
belief recapitulate the early psychic formation.
Perhaps the most complicated issue in the theory of the spectator is
IDENTIFICATION; not only is there a distinction between primary and
secondary identification in both psychoanalysis and film theory, but the
definition of these is interpreted differently by Freud and Lacan, and later
by Baudry and Metz, the two theorists to use the term the most
comprehensively. Briefly, in psychoanalysis the simplest definition of the
term involves a process of assimilation by the subject of an other, either in