'The Gaze and Psychoanalysis' notes.

The first significant thing we learned in this lecture was a Freudian approach to the mind: The mind is broken into 3 categories; the ego, which is our conscious mind. The Id, which is our desires and drives and the super-ego which acts as a filter between the two, inhibiting our desires based on a moral compass we develop. This was depicted using an iceberg as a metaphor:

Key Quote:
‘The self, for Freud, is not something which exists
independently of sexuality, libidinal enjoyment, fantasy or
the patriarchal culture of modern society.
Indeed the very distinction between subject and object, self
and world, necessarily involves a mind-shattering
repression of the unconscious imagination.
The human subject, in Freud’s opinion, only comes into
being through repression…….Selfhood is thus
fractured precariously between conscious and
unconscious.’ Elliot, A (2002)

In other words, humans are able to interact with others and the world around them by repressing our sexual and agressive desires, i.e. repressing the instinctual urge to act agressively toewards someone who is emotionally hurtful towards you.

Then we looked at why Psychoanalysis is useful in the art world, primarily it was uggested that Art looks at these desires and repressions. the first example of this is Freud's analysis of Moses by Michelangelo in 1914. He sked, did Michelangelo portray Moses abot to stand or about to sit. Frued suggested that he portrayed Moses about to stand up and act. This portrayal of Moses about to act, Freud would argue, is Michelangelo's way of visualising his own intellectual anger.



Other artists that deal with the unconscious mind and it's desires were the surrealist movement lead by Breton and Dali etc.

Object-Relations

A significant part of the lecture was object-relations. This is teh study of how we relate to objects, most signifcantly transitional objects; A transitional object is an object that allows us to move from our maternal connection to the real world by ourselves, for example a blanket, doll or teddy bear, in which we place significant emotional significance. ‘transitional objects’ (Winnicott, 1951) are precursors to our adult appreciation of art. Because we can ‘invest’ emotional energy into an inanimate object, we can also appreciate art and literature.

Advertising preys on this by replacing one feeling or desire with an object, for example we can replace or re-identify objects with sexuality or love etc. etc.

The Abject

The abject is the part of the body that repulses us, bodily-function, fluids etc. such as urine and blood. These acts are natural yet as societ and culture has progressed, there has been a sublimation of these instincts and natural 'things'. Society's progression is based on a 'renunciation of instinct' Freud (1930)

The Gaze
Laura Mulvey
‘Visual Pleasures and Narrative
Cinema’ (1975) Hollywood film is sexist in that it represents the gaze as powerful
and male. Heroes typically are male and drive the plot. Women in film exist as ‘sexual’ objects to be ‘looked at’

Scopophilia is the natural pleasure we get from looking at other's body's in an objectifying way.

‘…..at the extreme [scopohilia]
can become fixated into a
perversion, producing obsessive
voyeurs and Peeping Toms
whose only sexual satisfaction
can come from watching, in an
active controlling sense, an
objectified other.’ (Mulvey, 162)

Different types of Gaze: intra diagetic gaze – a gaze of one depicted person at another within the image. Degas' La Viol This gaze is ‘intra- diegetic’. It is a
character in the image that gazes at the subject (the young girl).

extra diagetic gaze – this is the direct address to the viewer – the gaze of a person in an image looking out at us – avoided in cinema, but common to advertising & TV newsreaders

Suture is where we're put into the eyes of a character in either a film or a videogame and we experience how they gaze upon the world. Suture can be broken when we realise that the gaze we're experiencing is constructed.