Caroline Bainbridge

Introduction to special issue on media and the inner world: New perspectives on psychoanalysis and popular culture

This editorial provides a context for this special issue of the journal and outlines its origins in the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Media and the Inner World research network. In the article, the network directors discuss the significance of British object relations psychoanalytic ideas for shaping new approaches to popular culture. Arguing that the articles constituting this edition contribute toward the formation of a distinctive ‘psycho-cultural’ approach to the application of psychoanalytic theory, the editors outline the main ideas underpinning each contributed article. Maintaining dialogue between the spheres of clinical practice and academic application is paramount here, highlighting the importance of process and demonstrating the specific value of this particular field of theory.

Psychotherapy on the couch: Exploring the fantasies of In Treatment

This article explores the circulation of fantasy in the television drama, In Treatment. Drawing on Roger Silverstones application of Winnicotts ideas to the socio-cultural role of television in everyday life, it takes up a psycho-cultural position on the role of television in the context of the broad cultural agreement that we now exist in a highly mediatised age. The article examines the implications for experiences of identity, and suggests that media have become psychological objects of the inner world and serve to allay the anxieties and contradictions of contemporary culture.

Introduction: Psycho-cultural Approaches to Emotion, Media and Popular Culture

This book sets out to foreground a distinctive new ‘psycho-cultural’ approach to popular culture and the media. Its approach has its roots in object relations psychoanalysis and demonstrates the usefulness of this critical framework for developing innovative theories and methods within media and cultural analysis. The collection of essays presented in this anthology have emerged from the Media and the Inner World (MiW) research network which focuses on the place of emotion and therapy in popular culture and the media. The network, which was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (2009–2013), has held a number of public roundtable discussions, seminars and conferences on various themes. These were framed by a concern to develop a psycho-cultural understanding of the relationships between objects of the media and popular culture and the processes of emotional experience and its role in shaping notions of identity and relatedness in the contemporary age. Many of the chapters in this book first took shape within these discussion spaces.

‘Cinematic Screaming’ or ‘All About My Mother’: Lars von Trier’s Cinematic Extremism as Therapeutic Encounter

Lars von Trier is an expert in making a name for himself. His role as an arch provocateur is very much allied to his orchestration of artifice as a means of using artistic endeavour in pursuit of an authentic sense of self. As he has stated, When life gets too threatening, you have to create some sort of fantasy existence, a life where you can control the things you can’t control in real life’ (Bjorkman, 2003, p. 19). The relationship of von Trier and his oeuvre to the process of therapeutic ‘working through’ (Freud, 1914) becomes interesting in this regard, and this chapter explores the question of whether filmmaking can function as a form of emotional work that may potentially have therapeutic value for those involved and, subsequently, whether this entails any opportunity for substantive emotional engagement on the part of viewers in the audience, evoking an experience that might be indicative of the kind of therapeutic insights afforded by the experience of clinical encounters. Of course, it is important to emphasise that the specificity of the clinical domain is unique to the psychotherapeutic setting and I am not suggesting here that the cinematic experience is remotely akin to this. Nevertheless, the specificity of the cinematic viewing context provides for modes of emotional experience that often go beyond the cathartic and this chapter sets out to explore whether the emotional work entailed can have a potentially ‘therapeutic’ effect of some kind in that it opens up spaces for self-re flection.

Impossible Differences: Slippages and Auguries

The attempts made throughout this book to outline ‘a feminine cinematics’ depend on a technique of film analysis that incorporates both formal and text-based criticism against a contextual background. In any interrogation of cultural artefacts, there is a need to construct a critique in terms of mode of production as well as content-based analyses, especially if the systems underpinning the means of production are also to be examined. Irigaray’s work makes it clear that analysing the commodities of symbolic exchange alone is not enough; feminist cultural theoreticians must also call into question the systems that are reflected in and perpetuated by it. Irigaray has commented that ‘no narrative, and no commentary on a narrative, is enough to bring about a change in discourse’ (1987/1993c: 177). Rather, it is necessary to disconcert the staging of representation according to exclusively ‘masculine’ parameters, that is, according to a phallocratic order. It is not a matter of toppling that order so as to replace it — that amounts to much the same thing in the end — but of disrupting and modifying it, starting from an ‘outside’ that is exempt, in part, from phallocratic law. (Irigaray, 1977/1985b: 68)

Reading the Feminine with Irigaray

Luce Irigaray is a theorist whose work has been examined from many different perspectives in the last thirty years. Her work has both been scrutinized by feminists sympathetic to her writings and by those who are more hostile to her engagement with philosophy and psychoanalysis. There is a panoply of views around her work that defies attempts to categorize them. There are three key positions that are commonly held in relation to Irigaray’s work. Certain feminists have challenged Irigaray’s work as (biologically) essentialist. Critics such as Moi (1985), Plaza (1978), Sayers (1982) and Segal (1987) argue that Irigaray’s work is based on a notion of feminine specificity that is somehow grounded in the psychic or material female body. There are, of course, many shortcomings in this approach to Irigaray’s work, perhaps the most important of which is that such analyses miss the very point of Irigaray’s engagement with the monolithic and monological texts of philosophy and psychoanalysis. Important responses to this criticism of Irigaray are made by Fuss (1989), Whitford (1991), Braidotti (2002), Deutscher (2002) and Stone (2006). The critique of essentialism in Irigaray’s work does not take account of the very radical attempts made throughout her work to posit a critique of patriarchy that makes possible a mode of change that has ramifications for notions of gendered subjectivity. In claiming that Irigaray’s work is ahistorical and non-materialist, such accounts reveal the extent to which Irigaray’s work has been dismissed on the basis of misreadings of her earliest texts. As Schor has pointed out, Irigaray is not interested in defining ‘woman’, but is, rather, committed to theorizing feminine specificity in terms that give due consideration to questions of sexual difference (Burke, Schor and whitford, 1994: 66).

Riddles of the Feminine in The Piano

Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) has garnered a great deal of both criticism and acclaim from commentators. The film is complex, dealing with issues of female desire, the maternal relation, post-colonialism and notions of language. The extensive critical engagement with this film suggests it is a key point of reference for anyone interested in women and cinema. Campion’s film is not a straightforward text — the duality of its ending alone makes for a complicated relationship between the spectator and the on-screen narrative, as I will discuss below. As this chapter will suggest, however, it is precisely this complexity that enables us to read the film as an exemplar of a feminine cinematics. In many ways, the film neatly encapsulates all that is most slippery around this concept, with many of the key ideas struggling to be articulated. This chapter will show how a feminine cinematics can be aligned with the feminist approach to ‘reading against the grain’. In order to do so, it will consider the structuring of the gaze within the film as well as key aspects of the narrative that relate to female genealogy and questions of parler femme.

Orlando and the Maze of Gender

Gender as a structuring element of subjectivity is a key theme in Sally Potter’s film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. This film, perhaps more than any of the others under discussion in this book, foregrounds the problematic of gender in its playful narrative. However, it is not just the narrative of the film which is of interest here. The form of Potter’s film and its context of production are also important in understanding how the film grapples with issues of gender and its pleasures and confusions. (Potter’s background as a self-consciously and overtly feminist director shows through in this regard, as does her selection of Tilda Swinton to play the lead in the film, as discussed below.) Orlando presents us with a very useful cinematic text, enabling us to examine the potential of an Irigarayan feminine cinematics, as this chapter will explore.

Fantasy and the Feminine: Female Perversions and Under the Skin

Fantasy is central to psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity and has become important also in the context of film theory, particularly in relation to efforts to theorize the cinematic treatment of gender. Some considerations of fantasy in relation to film focus on the fantasy genre and suggest that fantasy can be used to make sense of the cinematic experience as a means of escape from everyday life. However, for the concerns of this book, the most pertinent ideas about fantasy and cinema stem from the monolithic claims of apparatus theory discussed in Chapter 2. As we saw there, the main tenet of the argument was that classical cinema is structured according to male desire and fantasy. Subsequent feminist interventions have resulted in attempts to reformulate the importance of fantasy for cinema as this chapter will discuss. In order to make links to an Irigarayan perspective on fantasy and film, this chapter will then examine Susan Streitfeld’s Female Perversions and Carine Adler’s Under the Skin.

Screening Parler Femme: Silences of the Palace, Antonia’s Line and Faithless

As we saw in Chapter 1, the notion of parler femme has been central to much of Irigaray’s work, finding redefinition in the more recent writings as ‘the sexuation of discourse’. Parler femme is intricately bound up with the mother-daughter relation and with modalities of exchange between mothers and daughters that could be used to structure a feminine genealogical relation between them. The films scrutinized in this chapter are structured, to varying extents, through this relation between mothers and daughters. This chapter discusses how these films come to constitute spaces for the exploration of parler femme as it is set out in Irigaray’s writing. Before moving onto detailed scrutiny of the films, however, it seems appropriate to sketch a little more of the relation between parler femme and female genealogy.