Chaosophy - autonomous learning

18
E R '5 COUCH
Psychoanalysts are always a little suspicious of film, or rather, they
have always been attracted to other forms of expression. But the
reverse is not true. The covert advances of film into psychoanalysis
have been innumerable, beginning with Mr. Goldwyn's proposition
to Freud: $100,000 to put the famous loves on screen. This asymmetry
is due, no doubt, not only to matters of respectability; it is
tied, even more fundamentally, to the fact that psychoanalysis understands
nothing of the unconscious processes involved in cinema.
Psychoanalysis has sometimes tried to seize on the formal analogies
between dream and film-for Rene Laforgue, cinema is a sort of collective
dream; for Rene Lebovici, a dream to make spectators dream.
Psychoanalysis has tried to absorb filmic syntagms into the primary
processes, but it has never figured· out its specificity and fo r a good
reason: a normalization of the social imaginary that is irreducible to
familialist and Oedipal models, even on those occasions when it puts
itself deliberately at their service. Psychoanalysis now inflates itself in
vain with linguistics and mathematics; yet it also continues trotting
out the same generalities about the individual and the family, while
film is bound up with the whole social field and with history. Something
important happens in cinema where fantastic libidinal charges
are invested-for example, those clustered around certain complexes
that constitute the racist Western, Nazism, and the Resistance, the
"American way of life," etc. Sophocles no longer holds his own in all
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