Topic > Analysis of the link between cinema and psychoanalysis

The cinematographic experience can be a very profound and emotional experience and in this sense the similarity between dreams and cinema is evident. Sigmund Freud describes dreams as the highway to the unconscious. At the end of this royal road lies the Kingdom governed by the Unconscious or Mind. The royal family understands the events and emotions that have not been able to express themselves in the conscious world. These repressed emotions enter into constant battle with consciousness. The battle traps these emotions in a prison guarded by conscience. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay After the tiring battle and protection of conscience, he falls asleep. Repressed emotions take advantage of this moment, disguise themselves as a dream and escape from prison. He travels the entire royal path and seeks his freedom of expression. When imprisoned for a long time, these emotions become capable enough to destroy the entire realm of Mind. From this perspective we can assume that consciousness deliberately relaxes, allowing repressed people to escape into a safe world. “Film is the art of representing dreams,” wrote the poet Hilda Doolittle in 1930 (Lebeau 3). The purpose of cinema is similar to Freud's original logic that dreaming had the biological function of maintaining sleep undisturbed. Movies keep us undisturbed by our external reality so that when we finish watching a movie it's like waking up from a dream. Cinema and psychoanalysis mark their birth between the end of the mid-nineteenth century. This period is also known as the Fin de Siècl, characterized by world weariness that accompanies the opulence due to the emergence of new technologies. The new mass medium, cinema, becomes the means to escape the time full of anxiety. The Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud was a complex, brilliant, and dominant man who exerted a powerful impact on many of our hypotheses about personality and psychological disorders. He opened a new path towards the analysis of the human mind and its disorders. He discovered the three levels of the human mind and the corresponding three fundamental structures of the personality. The conscious level includes our current thoughts and perceptions and corresponding to it lies the Id which consists of all the basic impulses such as sexual desires, aggressive impulses and various bodily needs. The second level is the preconscious level which is made up of memories that are not part of current thinking but which can be recalled if necessary. The ego is this conscious mind. Finally, it is in the unconscious level that all our repressed emotions take refuge, such as fear, violent motives, selfish needs, shameful experiences and some unacceptable sexual desires. The Superego corresponds to this level and can be called our conscience. These terms are drawn from social contexts and cultural codes and influence how consciousness works. While the id requires immediate and total gratification, it is the ego's job to keep the id in check until conditions are suitable for the satisfaction of these impulses. . It is the task of the Superego to verify whether these conditions are morally correct or not. This moral conscience is internalized in us by our parents or as a result of society's norms. His theory of “Psychoanalysis” can be “defined as a form of mental therapy that aims to cure mental disorders by investigating the interaction of the conscious and unconscious elements of the mind” (Nagarajan 217). Psychoanalytic literary criticism was developed as a type of applied psychoanalysis. It emerges from Freud's general idea that the writingscreative processes are the product of unconscious processes and that it is possible to understand how the mechanisms of psychic forces operate in them. With his work in psychoanalysis Freud attempted to explain people's behavior and their dreams. Freud emphasizes that language revealed all hidden desires, anxieties and fears. According to him, desire is not expressed easily because culture neither allows nor facilitates it, and to discover it we need to pay attention to language and other forms of symbolic expression such as gestures, sounds, facial expressions, writings. The conscious self projects the kind of image that is culturally and socially acceptable. But the unconscious finds ways and means to express itself and this is what literary texts and language allow. Freud's intuition is that even the mechanism of the unconscious, of desires and fears required and acquired its own language. His theories on psychoanalysis brought systematic and scientific inquiry to the analysis of written works by examining compositions from different angles including gender, age, race, and sexuality. Many of Freud's thoughts and concepts have been translated by academics into theoretical frameworks that have then been applied to both literary and film criticism. When we watch movies, the Freudian ego and superego become evident in dualistic entities such as hero and villain or male and female. The surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s considered film with its special techniques such as fading, superposition and slow motion corresponding to the nature of dreams. The films dismantled reality into multiple images as if in surreal art and then reassembled those images to obtain a wonderful dream world that captured the unconscious of the mass audience. Psychoanalytic film theory is an approach that focuses on unmasking the ways in which the phenomenon of cinema in general and elements of film in particular are both shaped by the unconscious of the director, his characters and his audience. Freudian theories such as the unconscious, the return of the repressed, the Oedipal drama, narcissism, castration and hysteria can be applied to the psychoanalytic analysis of the film. This theory is a modern form of dream interpretation that puts fantasy at the center of understanding being and reality. Some of the film theorists are Jean Louis Baudry, Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey. The Metz debate is about language and filmic representation, while the Mulvey debate is about psychoanalytically informed feminist theory. Maxim Gorky, the Russian writer, describes cinema as a strange amalgam of art and technology, illusion and reality, capable of producing effects different from any mode of representation. Psychoanalysis offers the tools to account for the specifically visual aspect of the film, understood as a system of elaboration of a "scene", comparable to the "original scene" of psychoanalysis. Some critics use psychoanalytic theory to explain how film acts on the viewer's mind as an image such that the viewer can imagine his or her dreams being projected onto the screen. Freud's method of dream analysis is also used by some critics to interpret the meaning of a film. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get Custom Essay Films like Manichithrathazhu directed by Fazil in Mollywood features the protagonist gaining the personality of a Tamil dancer while reaching the higher realms of psychosis, Annyan directed by S. Shanker in Tollywood depicts the hero capturing three different personalities in he and Wrestler and Black Swan directed by Aronofsky in Hollywood, it can be studied and analyzed for its effects.