Footnote #60 - Psychoanalysis

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

Listen as Alex takes Chris through the desires and distresses of psychoanalysis in this new Fantasy/Animation Footnote, working through its status as a branch of psychological theory and the contribution of the seminal work of Sigmund Freud. Other topics in this instalment include the emergence of psychoanalytic thinking at the end of the nineteenth-century and its subsequent interdisciplinary influence; parapraxis and the interpretation, processing, and diagnosis of dreams; the ‘turn’ towards psychoanalytic film theory during the 1970s via Jacques Lacan and its renewed emphasis on the unconscious and desire; and the repressed of cinema spectatorship and what this means for understanding the film apparatus as a device of ideological positioning.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

  • Copjec, Joan. 1989. “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan.” October 49: 53-71.

  • Doane, Mary Ann. 1991. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. London & New York: Routledge. 

  • Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. 2004. Studies in Hysteria. Translated by Nicola Luckhurst. Penguin Books, London.

  • Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. 1990. Psychoanalysis & Cinema. London & New York: Routledge.

  • McGowan, Todd. 2007. The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan. Albany: State University of New York Press.

  • Metz, Christian. 1983. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

  • Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3: 6–18.

  • Sergeant, Alexander. 2012. Encountering the Impossible: The Fantastic in Hollywood Fantasy Cinema. New York: SUNY Press.

  • Tyrer, Ben. 2018. “VFX as Fantasmatic Supplement in Game of Thrones (2011-).” In Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres, edited by Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant, 91-106. London and New York: Routledge.

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantTHEORY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, UNCONSCIOUSComment