Date post: | 17-Dec-2015 |
Category: |
Documents |
Upload: | amber-richards |
View: | 219 times |
Download: | 2 times |
Lacan & Fellini
Fellini on Fellini
“Everyone lives in his own fantasy world, but most people don’t understand that. No one perceives the real world. Each person simply calls his private, personal fantasies the Truth. The difference is that I know I live in a fantasy world. I prefer it that way and resent anything that disturbs my vision.”
-- I, Fellini Charlotte Chandler
Fellini on Fellini
“Real life isn’t what interests me. I like to observe life, but to leave my imagination unfettered. Even as a child, I drew pictures not of a person, but of the picture in my mind of that person.”
-- I, Fellini Charlotte Chandler
Fellini on Fellini “I believe that in the beginning we were neither
male nor female, but androgynous, like angels…Then came the division… Our problem is to unite the two… man is always looking for his other half… He can’t be complete or wholly free until he has found his woman…This is the great problem for the protagonists in La Dolce Vita and 8 ½. Both Marcello and Guido are surrounded by women, but neither can find his woman. On the other hand, each of the women believes he is her man.”
-- I, Fellini Charlotte Chandler
Fellini on Fellini
“I was filled by school and church with an overwhelming sense of guilt before I had the faintest idea what I was guilty of.”
-- I, Fellini Charlotte Chandler
Fellini on Fellini
“The discovery of Jung helped me be bolder in my trust of fantasy over realism… I thought of him as my big brother… He saw dreams as archetypal images which were the result of the common experiences of man.”
-- I, Fellini Charlotte Chandler
Fellini on Fellini
“What I care about most is the freedom of man, the liberation of the individual from the network of moral and social conventions in which he believes, or rather in which he thinks he believes, and which encloses him and limits him and makes him narrower, smaller, sometimes worse than he really is.”
KEY CONCEPTS:
Id, Superego, Ego
Resolution of Oedipus complex > the Self
Repression
Dreams: displacement and condensation(metaphor and metonymy)
Neurosis and psychosis
Transference
Repressed Truths
as
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Jacques Lacan (1901-81)
Language Is Us
as
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
Self and identity are social constructions.
Our unconscious is just not inside us.
It is formed by language which is outside us and constructs our sense of self.
Language, our parents, the unconscious, the symbolic order represent the OTHER.
Jacques Lacan (1901-81)
We Want Our Mothers
as
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
IMAGINARY PHASE: One with mother (Oedipal)
MIRROR STAGE: We recognize a separate being in mirror, feel “lack” for mother; recognition of OTHER but not SELF; birth of the never-fulfilled ego (ideal self-image)
SYMBOLIC (Oedipal crisis): World of language and authority; Father rules; reason and order; unconscious is formed; emergence of desire
REAL: Ultra-conscious experiences that lie beyond Language such as death, terror, ecstasy, love; inexpressible; Kant’s “thing in itself”; the complete unattainable world
Jacques Lacan (1901-81)
God the Father is the Word
as
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
Phallogocentric view of life
Male bias of authority
God the Father
We move from the “lost plenitude of the originary mother-infant symbiotic state” to a state dominated by Language and Logos (reason, knowledge, systems of order)
This provokes a sense of desire
Feminists based theories upon Lacan
Jacques Lacan (1901-81)
Language Polices Our Instincts
as
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
IMAGINARY: Privileges fantasies and dreams
SYMBOLIC: Tries to make sense of the sensory through cultural authority policeable by the intellect
Freud tried to translate the Imaginary Order into the conceptual Symbolic Order
Jacques Lacan (1901-81)
Internal Battle of the Sexes
as
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
IMAGINARY (feminine) Mother Plentitude Creative Dreams & fantasies Illogical Madness Holiness Freedom Rebellion Ideal
SYMBOLIC (masculine) Father Lack and desire Restrictive authority Ordered reality Logic Controlled sanity Ritual Repression Social conformity Accepted imperfection
Fellini
Fantasy is Real
as
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
Unsuppressed imagination
Dreams & fantasies source of creativity
Plots driven by psychological associations
Spontaneity vs. conventional linear narrative
The fantastic as real; reality as shallow
Fellini
The Restriction of Reason
as
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
Phallogocentric order repressive
Social order inhibits freedom and creativity
God the Father is the law
Guilt and shame as control mechanisms
Insists on cutting the umbilical cord and all ties to the “feminine order”
Must overcome the Oedipus complex
Fellini
Free At Last
as
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
Freedom from social conventions and outmoded mythologies (structuring codes of language)
Seeks “salvation” outside the conventional mythology of the Church
“Phallocratric hollowness of Catholicism” (Roma: clerical fashion show)
Fellini
The Human Comedy
as
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
Absent father (hollow phallus)
Mother dominant
Perennial lack (quest for the Ideal)
Assertion of imaginative order as path to individual freedom
Acceptance of ideal as beyond man’s grasp
Life is a festival
Fellini
Comedy as Christian
as
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
Tragedy: The gnashing of teeth over man’s sins
OT Theology: man as evil
Comedy: We all have are flaws, but are still lovable
NT Theology: man as forgivable