Psychoanalysis and Cinema

Psychoanalysis and Cinema

That psychoanalysis and cinema share a great deal has almost become a conceptual and historical (indeed teleological) given. But one of the key attributes they share is hardly, if ever, mentioned. This is the idea of resistances – resistances to psychoanalysis and cinema as cultural processes, as analytic modes (indeed, as something worthy of analysis), their status within their fields, and even a questioning of their legitimacy to exist within the academy. Jacques Derrida, in a series of essays on psychoanalysis and resistance, commences with this idea that for its entire history psychoanalysis has always had to engage with the resistances to it, with its internal resistances, and through such engagements justify its existence. As Derrida puts it: ‘[T]here is a return, once again, of a resistance to psychoanalysis. There are countless signs that this resistance is growing and often novel in its social and institutional forms. It is as if, once assimilated or domesticated, psychoanalysis could be forgotten’ (1998: vii). Note that Derrida stops short of saying that such resistances could banish psychoanalysis altogether; but, like its most fundamental materiality, psychoanalysis risks becoming repressed through its analytic assimilation and domestication. Derrida then companions this resistance to psychoanalysis (as a methodology, as a culture of ideas) to another form of resistance, that of the resistances within analysis itself – an issue in which psychoanalysis is well versed in both theory and practice. What is suggested here is that cinema has experienced a similar history of resistance in both senses – to its existence as aesthetic object and for its analysis as critical worth. It may seem a little disingenuous to say that cinema has faced the same sorts of questions about its legitimacy, and yet there are comparisons to be found. For the greater part of its history cinema has had to ‘prove’ its aesthetic worth, to demonstrate that it should be taken seriously. The parallel histories run with resistances making not simply their uses an issue, but also the discourses that surround and commentate on them. How we might read psychoanalysis and cinema in such a way focuses part of the discussion here.

Rather than take up the relatively straightforward line that the relationship between psychoanalysis and cinema1 is one of theoretical approach to textual object, the main issue here is to consider how these [Page 227]two discourses operate in similar ways. Always present in such concerns, sometimes as a stumbling block and sometimes the offspring of a fecund marriage, is the fact that psychoanalysis never set out to become a theory of cinema. Which is, of course an issue not unique to cinema and psychoanalysis. Jean Laplanche argued against the type of psychoanalytic approaches to forms of textuality (for our concerns here this is cinema) that are perhaps the most seductive – of applying the terms to the texts. As he put it: ‘Applied is merely derivative, but what I call “extra-mural psychoanalysis,” psychoanalysis “outside the walls” or outside the cure, should have the ambition to have findings of its own (1992: 35). The idea of psychoanalysis with something like cinema having its own findings is what makes the relationship still one of great promise.

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