Psychoanalysis, Cinema, and Symbolism

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Psychoanalysis, Cinema, and Symbolism

In the article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey discusses the relationships amongst psychoanalysis (primarily Freudian theory), cinema (as she observed it in the mid 1970s), and the symbolism of the female body. Taking some of her statements and ideas slightly out of their context, it is interesting to compare her thoughts to the continuum of oral-print-image cultures.

A great deal of this interesting comparison is encouraged by the introductory sections of Mulvey’s essay. She writes, “the paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world” (198). If phallocentrism depends on an image, is it inherently part of a modern, image-based culture? Long before Freud and psychoanalysis, phallocentrism certainly existed in oral and written texts (though without this specific term to identify it). Can the “image” that Mulvey refers to include an image described with words, or is she writing exclusively of a visual, dimensional imag...

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