翻譯精神分析：解析《穆荷蘭大道》與《全面啟動》的夢境

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(1)Master Thesis Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation National Taiwan Normal University. Translating Psychoanalysis: The Interpretation of Dreams in Mulholland Drive and Inception. Advisor: Dr. Hsiu-chuan Lee. Hsin-yi Tsai. July 2018.

(2) ） interdisciplinary translation. intermedium translation 、. Sigmund Freud. David Lynch. 》 Drive. The Interpretation of Dreams. ！. （」. Mulholland. 「. Christopher Nolan. ）. Inception. ）. ！. ；. ！. ！：. 、. double psychoanalytic film theory 、 latent. 「 dream-thought. manifest dream-content. the. dream-work. ）. displacement. representation. condensation. secondary revision. 」. 「. 、」. 。」. i.

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(4) iii. Abstract With further development in the field of translation, recent studies have discovered that the act of translation appears in various forms. In this thesis, I propose the ideas of “interdisciplinary translation” and “intermedium translation” and discuss these two types of translation by examining how film texts translate psychoanalytic concepts. Based on my research on Sigmund Freud’s dream theory in The Interpretation of Dreams and examining two contemporary films—David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Christopher Nolan’s Inception, this thesis aims to study the process of translating dream concepts from psychoanalysis into cinema. This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One sets up the framework of this thesis by discussing the relationship between translation, psychoanalysis and cinema. I point out that psychoanalysis is a form of translation process and cinema is a medium for translation. The process of psychoanalysis is similar to that of translation: just as translators aim to translate the source text into the target text, psychoanalysts attempt to translate one’s unconscious and dreams into a narrative. During the translation process, translators must first understand the language and meaning of the source text, and then re-express the source text using a language that is comprehensible to their readers. Psychoanalysts often use spoken or written words to express their interpretation of dreams while cinema can imitate the workings of the mind. Thus, I propose that cinema should be considered as a more appropriate form of media for translating psychoanalytic concepts, such as dreams. Chapter Two reviews the interplay of psychoanalysis and cinema in history. Inspired by the techniques of cinema, some psychoanalysts further explore certain psychoanalytic concepts, such as the double. Meanwhile, cinema is also indebted to psychoanalysis. For example, some theorists examine how psychoanalytic thoughts are incorporated into cinematic studies, forming a new field of study known as psychoanalytic film theory. In addition, many film directors are interested in incorporating psychoanalytic concepts and portraying psychoanalytic treatment process in their works. Chapter Three introduces Freudian dream theory and analyzes the ways Lynch translated dream theory in Mulholland Drive. Freud conceived that dreams consist of latent dream-thoughts and manifest dream-content; the former is transformed into the latter through “dream-work,” which includes condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision. In Mulholland Drive, Lynch created the protagonist’s dream and her waking life. His.

(5) iv translation of the protagonist’s waking life into dreams can be understood through a comparison of the elements that appear in both the dream and the waking life. I observe that Lynch’s translation of dream-work complies with Freudian dream theory. Chapter Four analyzes the ways Nolan translated Freud’s dream theory in Inception as well as his exploration of innovative dream concepts, such as the influence between different dream layers in dreams-within-dreams. I also analyze Nolan’s cinematic techniques, such as the use of a simple cut to imitate the entry and exit of a dream. Based on these analyses, I conclude that Mulholland Drive and Inception are good examples of interdisciplinary translation and intermedium translation. “Interdisciplinary translation” refers to the translation from discipline A to discipline B; and “intermedium translation” refers to the translation from medium A into medium B. Investigating the translation of dreams from psychoanalysis to cinema, this thesis expands the scope of “translation” by shedding light on both interdisciplinary and intermedium translations. Keywords: interdisciplinary translation, intermedium translation, psychoanalysis, dream, Keywords: film text, contemporary cinema.

(6) v. Table of Contents. Chapter One Introduction: Translation, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema ...........................................................1 Definitions of Translation Psychoanalysis as Translation Cinema as Translation Chapters. Chapter Two Psychoanalysis and Cinema: A Historical Survey ..................................................................15 Early Developments Psychoanalytic Film Theory Contemporary Psychoanalytic Films. Chapter Three Between Waking Life and Dreams: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive ..................................35 The Formation of Dreams Translating Waking Life into Dreams in Mulholland Drive. Chapter Four Between Established Dream Theories and Innovative Dream Concepts: Christopher Nolan’s Inception ................................................................................................53 Examples from Inception New Concepts of Dreams. Chapter Five Conclusion .......................................................................................................73. Works Cited ..........................................................................................................................77 Films Cited. ..........................................................................................................................85.

(7) vi. Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Hsiu-chuan Lee, with all my heart. Professor Lee has always been there giving me invaluable guidance and suggestions, ensuring that I stay on course and do not deviate from the core of my research. I have also learned from her that “it is essential to learn to clarify and organize my thoughts through the process of writing and rewriting.” During the process of research, I have learned from her not only methods for conducting academic researches but also approaches to life. Thank you, Professor Lee, for your continuous support, patience, motivation and immense knowledge that help me carry through this research and complete it satisfactorily. I take immense pleasure in thanking Professor Ken-fang Lee, a thesis committee member and an encouraging teacher. It is Professor Lee’s course Film and Translation that triggered my interest in academic research and opened my eyes to see a broadening field of translation studies. Throughout the time of our discussions, Professor Lee has given me many stimulating and constructive ideas; and after each discussion, my mind has become clearer. Therefore, I owe my sincere thanks to Professor Lee. I would like to express my gratitude to my thesis committee member, Professor Chiwen Liu at Fu Jen University. Professor Liu has provided detailed and insightful comments that are very helpful to perfecting my thesis. It is such a great honor to be able to have Professor Liu as my thesis committee member. I also take this opportunity to extend my gratitude to the teachers at Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation (GITI) at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU): Bijou Chen, Daniel Hu, Sharon Lai, Posen Liao and Carlos G. Tee. Each and every course that I took at GITI has greatly motivated me to further explore issues related to not just translation but also many others. I have received enormous benefits from the curriculum at NTNU, and I am obliged to all my teachers for their instruction and encouragement. I would like to thank my dear friends: Chloe and Evon, thank you for exchanging useful thoughts and keeping company with me during the writing process; Katie and Margaret, thank you for lending a helping hand to “translate” my thoughts and make my words more comprehensible to the readers. Furthermore, my thanks to Kirsten, Scott, Jessi, Chloe, Meixin, Ingrid, Rita and many others for giving substantial help as well as emotional support..

(8) vii Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents for supporting me unconditionally through my life. Thank you for your wholehearted parenting and caring, allowing me to fully concentrate on my studies. My parents are my think tank—each time after talks with them, I am greatly inspired and I have learned so much from them. Without my beloved parents, this work would not have been possible and I shall eternally be grateful to them for their support. 。，.

(9) Chapter One Introduction: Translation, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema. Translation studies is an emerging interdiscipline that tends to draw on thoughts from various fields. Early development of translation studies in the 1950s drew on theories from linguistics and comparative literature; and translation studies at that time mainly focused on textual analysis. In the late 20th century, the Cultural Turn in translation made the focus of research shift from language and text to the context of works and the subjectivity of translators; influences from other domains such as hermeneutics, post-colonialism, and feminism were also obvious. In recent years, various forms of translation have been discovered and discussed. For example, in the thesis “‘Letter Correspondence’ in the MiniSeries Pride and Prejudice: The Analysis of Semiotics Translation from the Perspective of A Theory of Adaptation” (2018), Ning Shan started from the point of view of intersemiotic translation and utilized Linda Hutcheon’s argument of “adaptation is regarded as translation” to discuss how letter correspondence in novels are “translated” into television series. As forms of translation become diversified, the outlook on translation has been expanded. Up to now, translation theorists have gathered and put forward many valuable studies and theories. Translation studies has grown rapidly, and also has brought new questions. For example, scholars like Rainer Guldin pointed out the similarities between the process of translation and that of psychoanalysis (78-81). Could we see psychoanalysis as a form of translation then? Besides different forms of translation, there are also different types of texts. In the past, translation studies is mostly concerned with verbal texts; but nowadays, along with the development of technology, multimedia is often viewed as a type of text. Therefore, some translation researches such as Shan’s treat films and TV series as translated texts and analyze their “translations” of novels, stories or other forms of publications.. 1.

(10) 2. The goal of this thesis is to look into the obscure and unexplored types of translation.. Based on the idea of psychoanalysis as a method of translation and cinema as a medium to translate, this thesis will investigate how cinema translates psychoanalytic materials—dreams in particular. More generally, this thesis is an attempt to contribute to the investigation of two types of translation which I call “interdisciplinary translation” and “intermedium translation,” which are different from the conventional translation between written or spoken texts of two languages.1 Having said this, there is no adequate theory at the moment to account for “interdisciplinary translation” and “intermedium translation.” Therefore, in this thesis, I endeavor to establish a theoretical framework and provide examples to elaborate on the practice of cinema’s translation of psychoanalytic materials. In what follows, I will first review the development of translation studies and discuss the gradually widening definition of translation. Secondly, I will discuss the resemblances between translation and psychoanalysis. Finally, I will explain how cinema works as a medium for translation.. Definitions of Translation “The definition of translation determines the scope of translation studies” (35), pointed out by Long Jixing in the essay “Changes of Translation Definition and Turns of Translation Studies” (2012). Traditionally, translation is understood as “the transfer of meaning from a text in one language into a text in another language” (Bell 8), and the “language” here refers to natural languages such as English and Chinese. A translator has one text written in one language, the source language, and thus this text is called the source text. But the reader of another language does not understand the meaning of the source text because he/she does not know the source language. In order to introduce the source text to the 1. The concept of “intermedium translation” may sound similar to adaptation in transferring texts from one medium (such as novel) into another medium (such as film). However, while studies of adaptation often focus on comparing the representations of the same text on two apparatus, by “intermedium translation” I mean to draw into my concern the nature and theories of two media: psychoanalysis and cinema..

(11) . 3. reader, a translator needs to use the language that is comprehensible to the reader, which is the target language. Then, the source text is translated into the target text and this process is translation. Since the 1950s, theorists such as Eugene Nida, J. C. Catford, and Peter Newmark brought theories of linguistics to the field of translation. For example, Catford defined translation as “a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another” (1), while Newmark shared a similar view by saying that translation is “rendering the meaning of a text into another language in the way that the author intended the text” (5). These scholars considered translation as “the substitution of texts from one language to another” and “the meaning exchanges between languages” (Long 37). Furthermore, in an influential essay “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (1959), Roman Jakobson divided translation into three categories from the linguistic perspective. The first type is the intralingual translation (or rewording) which refers to “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language” (Jakobson 233). For example, rendering classic literatures into versions with simpler word choices (using the same language) for children to read is a form of intralingual translation. The second type is the interlingual translation (or translation proper) which refers to “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language” (Jakobson 233). The most common translation practices belong to this category, such as translating a Chinese text into an English text. And the third type is the intersemiotic translation (or transmutation) which refers to “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (Jakobson 233). In other words, intersemiotic translation is the transposition from one sign system (for example, words) to another (for example, images); for example, adapting a novel into a film. All these three types of translation adopt a linguistic paradigm, and translation studies at that time tend to focus on textual analysis and emphasize the equivalence between the original and translated texts..

(12) 4. In the 1990s, due to the Cultural Turn in translation, the focus of translation studies. shifted from linguistics to culture. The Cultural Turn in translation studies was put forward by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere in the anthology Translation, History and Culture (1990). Bassnett and Lefevere believed that “there is always a context in which the translation takes place, always a history from which a text emerges and into which a text is transposed” (11). Therefore, they contended that when conducting translation studies, one should not only examine the texts, but also take the context of the work and the subjectivity of translator into consideration. Bassnett and Lefevere also pointed out that “translation as an activity is always doubly contextualized, since the text has a place in two cultures” (11). Translation studies under the influence of the Cultural Turn pay attention to cultural aspects, particularly the cultural influences on the target text, instead of the equivalence between the source and target texts. They are not only about studying translated texts between languages but also about studying the interactions between cultures. Since the Cultural Turn, many theories from other fields, including hermeneutics, have been introduced into the field of translation. The term “hermeneutics” is derived from Greek, meaning “to translate, to interpret.” Hermeneutics is a theory and methodology of understanding and interpretation. Because the initial step in the act of translation is to understand source texts, it is very useful to introduce hermeneutics into translation studies. Traditionally, translation studies puts emphasis on the ability of the target language to express ideas in the source language; but with hermeneutic theory, scholars began to pay attention to how the source language is perceived and understood. Based on hermeneutic theory, George Steiner proposed the notion of “understanding as translation” in his book After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975). According to Steiner, “a human being performs an act of translation, in the full sense of the word, when receiving a speechmessage from any other human being” (48). When communicating with another person, the.

(13) . 5. speaker says a sentence and you hear it. Then, you need to “understand” what that sentence means. So, you start to make judgments in your brain. You must depend on various factors, such as the things you know about the speaker and the environment where you two are communicating, to know the meaning of the sentence. To Steiner, from the moment you receive that sentence to the moment you figure out the meaning, this process of understanding is a translation process. This is why Steiner said: “To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate” (xii). Following Steiner’s statement of “understanding as translation,” Paul Ricoeur proposed that there are two paradigms of translation in his essay “The Paradigm of Translation” published in 1998 and later translated and collected in the book On Translation (2006). One is the linguistic paradigm which refers to the transfer of meaning within a language or between languages. The other is the ontological paradigm, inspired by Steiner’s After Babel, which refers to the way of understanding oneself and another. Based on Ricoeur’s arguments, in his introduction of On Translation, Richard Kearney suggested that the first paradigm talks about translation in a specific sense while the second paradigm discusses translation in a general sense. Kearney gave special attention to the second model. He argued: “it indicates the everyday act of speaking as a way not only of translating oneself to oneself (inner to outer, private to public, unconscious to conscious, etc.) but also and more explicitly of translating oneself to others” (xiv-xv). Here, the acts of translation appear in all kinds of human activities, and one of which is psychoanalysis. Noteworthily, the work of a psychoanalyst is to understand an other, namely the analysand. In that sense, a psychoanalyst can be seen as a translator, attempting to translate a person’s unconscious..

(14) 6. Psychoanalysis as Translation The idea of psychoanalysis first received serious consideration under Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) who had developed his own psychoanalytic theory since the 1890s. Freud’s several works have made great contribution to lay the foundations for psychoanalytic theory, for example, Studies on Hysteria (1895) which he and Josef Breuer coauthored, introducing case studies of patients with hysteria as well as setting out theories and therapies for hysteria; and The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which Freud provided detailed interpretations of his own and his patients’ dreams according to the “dream-work” operated by our psychical apparatus, setting out his theory of “a dream is the fulfilment of a wish” (147). On this basis, Freud further developed his theory of the unconscious and formulated a model of psychic structure comprising id, ego, and super-ego. Freud’s theories contribute enormously to our understanding of the human mind, specifically the unconscious; and thus, Freud is often recognized as the founding father of psychoanalysis. Besides making contributions to the discipline of psychoanalysis, Freud also received credits from the field of translation. In the essay “Toward the Understanding of Translation in Psychoanalysis” (1980), Patrick Mahony proposed that “Freud should be ranked among the world’s major theoreticians of translation, for he ascribes to the concept a scope and depth that appeared nowhere before in history” (472). Based on his discussion over the use of the German word Übersetzung, which is often translated as “translation” in English, in Freud’s works, Mahony suggested that there are many elements that could be considered as translations in Freudian psychoanalysis: … neurotic symptoms as in the case of hysteria might be translations of unconscious material; and the manifest or pictorial dream is nothing but a kind of internalized intersemiotic translation of the previous verbal latent dream. Many of the psychoanalyst’s interventions are also translations, and even more than this, the very.

(15) . 7 movement of material in the psychic apparatus as such is understood as translation, whereas repression is a failure in translation. (466). According to Mahony, the literal use of the German word Übersetzung “as translation and transposition” (473) in Freud’s works indicates that Freud regarded the transfer of psychic materials from the unconscious to the conscious levels as a form of translation. On that account, Freud expanded the definition of translation. The investigation on the mental process in Freud’s works reminds us of the studies of translation. Indeed, Freud should be considered as one of the great thinkers and innovators in the domain of translation. In spite of the fact that Freud did not directly discuss the relation between psychoanalysis and translation when developing his own psychoanalytic theory, Freud’s own words somehow imply the ideas of translation in psychoanalysis. Take his discussions of dreams for example. In the chapter “Psychoanalysis and Translation” of his book Translation and the Nature of Philosophy (1989), Andrew Benjamin pointed out that translation exists on two levels in Freud’s theories of dreams: First, “the manifest content is a translation of the latent content [dream-thoughts]” (145). In the formation of dreams, the latent dream-thoughts are turned into the manifest dream-content. The process of dream formation thus resembles a translation process. Second, “the interpretation of the manifest content involves its translation into the language of consciousness” (145). When a psychoanalyst interprets dreams, he/she turns the manifest dream-content into everyday language. The process of dream interpretation is therefore also a translation process. In elaboration according to Freud, dreams are composed of the manifest dreamcontent and the latent dream-thoughts. The manifest dream-content refers to the literal image and/or the storyline that one can grasp after waking up. For example, one dreamed about a dog—that is the literal image in the dream; and in this dream, the dog is chasing someone— that is the plot of the dream. But what does this chasing dog mean in this dream? The.

(16) 8. underlying meaning of dreams is related to the latent dream-thoughts. Freud himself employed a “translation” metaphor to describe the relationship between dream-content and dream-thoughts in The Interpretation of Dreams: The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the dreamcontent seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression[;] … it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation. (295) Freud compared the dream-content and dream-thoughts as two languages and the latter can be translated to the former. Freud further wrote: A dream-thought is unusable so long as it is expressed in an abstract form; but when once it has been transformed into pictorial language, … [it] can be established more easily than before between the new form of expression and the remainder of the material underlying the dream. (354) Here, Freud pointed out that the latent dream-thoughts is too abstract to be perceivable, and therefore it must be transformed into some “pictorial language,” namely the manifest dreamcontent, for becoming accessible. The “dream-work,” including condensation and displacement, of our psychical apparatus is essential in transforming the latent dreamthoughts into manifest dream-content. Accordingly, dreams are formed through a translation process. The second argument proposed by Benjamin—psychoanalyst’s interpretation is also a translation process—can be explained with Freud’s comparison dreams to rebuses. Because the manifest dream-content “is expressed as it were in a pictographic script” (296), Freud used a rebus as a metaphor for dreams to explain the task of dream interpretation. A rebus is a picture-puzzle which contains illustrated pictures and individual letters to depict words and/or.

(17) . 9. phrases. If one wants to solve a rebus, he/she needs to know how to replace each element by a syllable or word and form a meaningful word and/or phrase. For example, if one wants to solve an English rebus, he/she needs the knowledge of English language. In the same sense, if one wants to solve a “dream rebus” (i.e. to interpret a dream), he/she is required to have “the knowledge of dreams” (i.e. the dream-work). But the task of dream interpretation is not yet finished after solving the rebus. In addition to understanding the dream-work and figuring out the meaning of dreams, psychoanalysts also need to present the meaning in languages that are understandable to the analysands. And such a presentation, as pointed out by Benjamin, “involves a ‘translation’ into the language of consciousness” (136). In the interpretation of dreams, the “language of consciousness” that psychoanalysts use is usually in verbal forms, namely spoken or written words. Briefly, in the process of interpreting dreams, psychoanalysts have to first understand the operations of the dream-work in dreams, and then to express the meaning of the dreams by using languages that are comprehensible to the analysands. This process is similar to the process of translation: translators need to first understand the text in the source language, and then to express the meaning of the source text by using the target language (i.e. language that is understandable to the target reader)..

(18) 10 This parallel structure between the process of translation and that of psychoanalysis can be put into a figure (see Fig. 1). to make sense of the latent dream. latent dream --------------source text. translation (1). manifest dream --------------target text. translation (2). interpretation ------------reading. to make sense of the source text Fig. 1 Parallel structure between translation and psychoanalysis In the process of psychoanalysis, the latent dream thoughts are “translated” into the manifest dream-content, which is further “translated” into psychoanalyst’s interpretation. The intention of psychoanalyst’s interpretation is to make sense of the latent dream-thoughts; likewise, in the process of translation, the source text is translated into the target text, which is then “translated” through reader’s reading. The intention of reader’s reading is also to make sense of the source text. Therefore, we can say that the psychoanalyst serves as a translator and the psychoanalyst’s interpreting process is similar to a translation process.. Cinema as Translation In the essay “Image and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Paul Ricoeur contended that “the universe of discourse appropriate to the analytic experience is not that of language, but that of the image” (94). Ricoeur illustrated his argument with examples drawn from the formation of dreams. According to Freud, dreams are made of psychical material. And Ricoeur suggested that this psychical material is made primarily of “images” that figurize dream-ideas. One has to note that the term “image” employed by Ricoeur does not simply refer to static images but also to a figurizing process—“a general procedure for obtaining an.

(19) . 11. image for a concept” (“Image and Language” 114). Using Freud’s term, one would argue that this “imaging” process is the dream-work. Since our psychical life is functioning primarily at a pictorial level, using written or spoken languages to express dreams and the unconscious is inadequate. Both Ricoeur and Freud compared dreams to plastic arts of painting and sculpture, arguing that human psyche has the ability “to express or indicate plastically the dream ideas” in images (“Image and Language” 110). In this thesis, I would like to extend their thoughts and recommend another medium that has similar capacity to that of human psyches—cinema. Several scholars pointed out that cinema can function like the human mind. For example, in the essay “Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories” (1993/1994), Stephen Heath described cinema “as an analogy for mental processes—cinema [is] regarded as a good way of imaging the workings of the mind” (26). Likewise, Vicky Lebeau said in her book Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows (2006) that “cinema has a special tie to the life of the mind: approximate, imitative, it is a type of mime of both mind and world” (3). These thoughts provide a point of departure for considering cinema as a suitable tool to translate psychoanalytic materials, such as dreams and the unconscious. Cinema, as a medium and a language, can translate psychoanalytical materials on two levels. First, cinema offers a figured language. When interpreting one’s dreams into narratives, psychoanalysts usually turn the visual into words. But as Ricoeur pointed out, dreams as well as the unconscious work at the pictorial level. Thus, by using cinema as a medium to translate dreams, one’s dreams can be translated (back) into visual codes, very much resembling the visual experiences in dreams. Second, cinema offers a language that is accessible to the public. Cinematic language can explicate psychoanalysis and make the difficult psychoanalytic thoughts understandable to the general public. For example, Slavoj Žižek declared in the introduction of his book Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in.

(20) 12 Hollywood and Out (1992) that his understanding of Lacan can be “explained by way of examples from Hollywood or popular culture in general” (xi). Using cinema as a medium to translate the filmmakers’ thoughts is similar to the way translators/psychoanalysts use languages/narratives to translate the source texts/dreams. As mentioned before, the process of translation and that of psychoanalysis share a parallel structure; and now, I would like to add the process of filmmaking to this parallel structure (see Fig. 2). In figure 2, the source text in the first box is something abstract (patients’ dreams, filmmakers’ thoughts and the unconscious), and the target text in the second box is something visible (narrative words and cinematic images). The process of translation is turning something abstract into something figured and visible for easier perception. source text --------------dreams thoughts. translator --------------analyst filmmaker. target text --------------narratives films. reader --------------patient viewer. Fig. 2 The parallel structure between translation, psychoanalysis, and cinema Among all kinds of cinema, it is the psychoanalytic films that feature the most apparent intention of cinema makers to translate psychoanalysis to the public. By psychoanalytic films, I refer to films that try to portray the process of psychoanalytic treatment, as well as films that try to elaborate or draw on psychoanalytic ideas into their creations. An early example of psychoanalytic film that portrays the process of psychoanalytic treatment is Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). This film is about a man, who forgot his identity, encounters a female psychoanalyst. Together they try to retrieve the identity of the man. The relationship between these two characters is complicated—they are in a doctor-patient relationship, but at the same time, they are also in a romantic relationship. Besides such a plot arrangement, Hitchcock also introduced dream interpretation as an important method of psychic treatment by working with the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí to.

(21) . 13. construct the dream scenes in the film. In recent years, more films about the process of psychoanalysis hit the screen, including Rodrigo García’s Passengers (2008). This film tells the story of a man starts to see a female psychotherapist after a plane crash, and he tries to recover from the trauma. Passengers too is concerned with the intricate relationship between the psychotherapist and the patient, but the storyline has a different emphasis on the relationship between the living and the dead. Many recent films also draw on psychoanalytic thoughts. One of the concepts that appears frequently in films is multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia. One example is David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999). At the beginning of the film, the leading character (as well as the audience) thinks that he meets a person and befriends that person. However, in the latter half of the film, the leading character realizes that this “new friend” is actually not another individual, but another personality of the leading character himself. Also dealing with the problem of self-splitting, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) tells a story about the schizophrenia of a ballet dancer. In this film, the ballet company is about to perform Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Being cast as both the White Swan and the Black Swan, the ballet dancer suffers from splitting personalities. One may also note that both Fight Club and Black Sawn portray the multiple personality disorder in a unique way: instead of using the same actor and actress to play the splitting selves, both films cast two actors and actresses.. Chapters Given the rich materials yielded from cinema’s attempting to “translate” psychoanalysis, this thesis would not be to offer an exhausting studies in this field. To make my project manageable, I will focus on the concept of dreams and choose only two contemporary films for close analysis. In order to understand the concept of dreams, I draw on Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. The two contemporary films under my.

(22) 14 consideration are David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010). I will discuss how Lynch and Nolan are indebted to Freud’s dream theories while presenting dreams in their films. The theories of dreams offer the source text and source language for the directors to create the dreams in their cinematic works. For me, both films offer examples of “interdisciplinary translation”: they translate psychoanalytic thoughts into their cinematic contents. After this opening chapter, the second chapter of this thesis reviews the interplay of psychoanalysis and cinema in history. Starting from the early development of the two disciplines, I study how psychoanalysis and cinema influences and enrich each other. The third and the fourth chapters are devoted to analyses of specific cinematic examples. In Chapter Three, I examine how David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive employs Freud’s theory on dream-work to produce the dreams of its protagonists based on her waking life. By teasing out the linkage between the protagonists’ dreams and waking life, I demonstrate not only the formation of dreams as a translation process but also Lynch’s efforts to translate Freud’s dream theories into his cinematic production. In Chapter Four, I analyze Christopher Nolan’s Inception. In addition to pointing out Nolan’s indebtedness to the Freudian theories, I would also attend to his innovative ideas about dreams. A comparison between Freudian and Nolan’s concepts of dreams will help reveal Nolan’s creativity in his “translation” of Freud’s dream theories. In Chapter Five, I conclude the thesis by reviewing my discovery in each chapter. This thesis attempts to investigate how the concepts of dreams are being translated into cinematic language, which is exemplary of “interdisciplinary translation” and “intermedium translation.” Through the analyses of two films, I hope to formulate my own theory of the “interdisciplinary translation” and “intermedium translation” proposed in this thesis..

(23) Chapter Two Psychoanalysis and Cinema: A Historical Survey. In “Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories,” Stephen Heath considered that cinema and psychoanalysis have parallel histories—starting from the early development in which the two fields brought influences to each other, to the later formation of psychoanalytic film theory. In 1993, a conference under the same title of Heath’s essay was held at the University of California, Los Angeles, bringing together practicing psychoanalysts and film theorists. The purpose of this conference is to celebrate the centenary anniversaries of both fields and encourage communication among scholars of cinema and psychoanalysis. However, even though the two fields have developed such an intertwining relationship, as pointed out by Janet Bergstrom in the book Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories (1999), “the reasons that psychoanalysts reflect on the cinema are not the same as those that motivate film theorists to draw on psychoanalysis” (1). This chapter combs through the interplay between cinema and psychoanalysis in history and lays the groundwork for the examination of how cinema may translate psychoanalytic concepts.. Early Developments The close connection between psychoanalysis and cinema can trace to the birth of the two disciplines. In her book, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows, Vicky Lebeau pointed out that 1895 is a significant year for both disciplines (1). On December 28, 1895, the first public screening of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s cinematic creation was held in the basement of the Grand Café in Paris. The Lumière brothers demonstrated a new device, the Cinématographe, which is a type of camera that can project moving pictures on a screen. This successful screening is often considered the beginning of cinema. In the same year,. 15.

(24) 16 Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer published their book Studies on Hysteria (German: Studien über Hysterie). In this book, Freud and Breuer introduced five case studies of women afflicted with hysteria, followed by theoretical reflections and the introduction of therapeutic methods. This book can be seen as the starting point of psychoanalysis which laid the foundation for modern psychoanalytic knowledge. Introducing as new ways of “seeing and knowing the world” (Lebeau 2), both cinema and psychoanalysis in their early stage brought huge impact on the world. When the audiences at the Grand Café watched Lumière brothers’ silent film The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (French: L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, 1896), they did not sit still in the seat as we modern audience normally do; instead, they started panicking because they thought the locomotive on the screen was barreling straight towards them. Cinema could create a powerful illusion through camera’s ability to capture the reality of material world and projector’s ability to turn still photographs into moving images. Therefore, while sitting in the basement of a café, the spectators were able to see the “same scene” of a train coming into the station as those passengers who were waiting at the train station did. Such a confusion between the reality and illusions, according to Lebeau, gives the spectators a feeling “as if in a dream” (1). And while the early cinema brought a sense of shock to the audience, the emergence of psychoanalysis prompted similar sentiments and reactions. Before the publication of Studies on Hysteria, no one had ever thought of hysteria as a mental illness nor of its relation to the unconscious mind. Most medical professionals considered hysteria “a ‘false,’ or simulated, condition unworthy of serious attention” (Lebeau 15). One of the reasons why doctors in the past did not understand hysteria is that they could not “see” what’s going on inside the patients’ mind. Despite such a prevalent view of not considering hysteria as an illness, Freud, inspired by Jean-Martin Charcot, managed to discover the causes and treatments for hysteria. With psychotherapies proposed by Breuer and Freud, such.

(25) . 17. as the talking cure and free association, people for the first time were able to “look into” the human mind. As James Strachey pointed out in the editor’s introduction to his English translation of Studies on Hysteria, one of Freud’s greatest achievements would be “his invention of the first instrument for the scientific examination of the human mind” (Breuer and Freud xvi), which opened the door to new ways of understanding the internal world of man. During the early years of their development, cinema and psychoanalysis expressed interest in and sought inspirations from each other. Since the 1910s, film directors have intended to integrate psychoanalysis into cinema. The first psychoanalytic film was the 1912 French silent film The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador (French: Le Mystère des roches de Kador), directed by Léonce Perret (Bergstrom 15). The film is about a young woman named Suzanne. After her father (some recorded as uncle) passed away, according to the deceased’s will, Suzanne will inherit his fortune when she reaches adulthood. However, her guardian who covets the legacy tries to kill her. When Suzanne and her lover Jean d’Erquy meet at the beach near the Rocks of Kador, the guardian plots to kill both of them by poisoning Suzanne and shooting d’Erquy from the back. Neither one is dead; but d’Erquy is injured and Suzanne becomes catatonic. D’Erquy then turns to Professor Williams, whose treatment includes “the application of the Cinematographe to psychotherapy” (qtd. in Bergstrom 16). By filming the beach scene which causes Suzanne’s trauma and presenting the film to her, Professor Williams successfully cures Suzanne. Perret’s film made a twofold demonstration of how cinema could relate to psychoanalysis: representing psychoanalytic treatment process in films as well as utilizing cinema as a psychotherapeutic instrument. The film portrays the treatment process of Suzanne, starting from the cause of her illness to her full recovery; and the filmwithin-the-film is a manifestation of the effective use of cinema in psychoanalytic treatment..

(26) 18 Another example which embodies the mutually enriching relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis is the 1913 German silent film The Student of Prague (German: Der Student von Prag), directed by Stellan Rye and Paul Wegener. The film, also known as A Bargain with Satan, is the story of an impoverished student named Balduin, who made a deal with a sorcerer named Scapinelli. The sorcerer promised to give Balduin 100,000 pieces of gold in exchange for any item to be found in the student’s room. The poor student agreed to the deal for he thought there was nothing valuable in his room; but astonishingly, the sorcerer called forth Balduin’s reflection from the mirror. Shortly afterwards, Balduin decided to pursue Countess Margit, but he was haunted by the appearance of his double. When Baron Waldis-Schwarzenberg, cousin of the Countess and a rival wooer, challenged Balduin to fight in a duel, the double showed up and killed the Baron. Balduin then decided to kill the double so as to end the chaos caused by his double. Balduin got a pistol and fired at the double, but it turned out that the bullet shot at his double killed Balduin himself. The Student of Prague touches on the idea of the doppelgänger.2 In order to create the effect of the double, cinematographer Guido Seeber employed innovative cinematic techniques, such as “doubling the actor on the divided screen, superimposing other images” (qtd. in Brown 99). This film not only brought into cinematic presence the concept of the double but also influenced the development of psychoanalysis. It is The Student of Prague that inspired Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank (1884-1939) to explore further into the concept of the double and later publish his famous work The Double (German: Der Doppelgänger) in German in 1925 (and was translated into English in 1971). Rank was aware of the capability of cinematic. 2. The term doppelgänger is a loanword from German, which refers to a look-alike or double of a person; it is sometimes seen as a paranormal phenomenon. The first known use of doppelgänger (in a slightly different form doppeltgänger) appeared in the late 1790s in German writer Jean Paul’s novel Siebenkäs (1796); later on, in the 19th century, many writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Fyodor Dostoyevsky used this concept in literature. The 1913 The Student of Prague is one of the first films to draw on the concept of the double in films..

(27) . 19. techniques to “convey the presence of a ‘double personality’ in a way that literature could not” (Packer, Dreams in Myth 38). In the 1920s and 1930s, a cultural movement in Europe heightened the interaction between cinema and psychoanalysis: Surrealism. The aim of Surrealism, according to The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists, was to “release the creative powers of the unconscious mind” and express through all kinds of art forms (Chilvers 611). Surrealism was under the influence of Freudian theories of dreams and the unconscious (Creed 77). In Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), the founder of Surrealism André Breton borrowed the concept of “the depths of mind” from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and stretched out to discuss “the depth of dream”: “What I most enjoy contemplating about a dream is everything that sinks back below the surface in a waking state… In ‘reality,’ likewise, I prefer to fall” (qtd. in Finkelstein 2). Surrealists saw the resemblance between cinema and dream. In 1925, the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos published a short article in the Journal Littéraire in which he described his childhood cinema experience: “The perfect night of the cinema does not offer us merely the miracle of the screen, a neutral ground on which dreams are projected, but, more than that, it offers us the most enjoyable form of modern adventure” (qtd. in Finkelstein 1). Indeed, the connection between cinema screen and dream had later become a topic which caught the interest of psychoanalysts. In addition to artists and filmmakers’ interests in exploring psychoanalytic concepts through films, certain psychoanalysts also took notice of the capability of cinematic techniques to imitate human mind. The Russian-born psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) explained this capability. Though seemingly sneering at cinema for it offered only “superficial pleasure” (qtd. in Heath 49), Salomé still made a note of her reflections on cinema as she wrote: “cinematic technique is the only one which allows a rapid succession of images approximating to our own imaginative activity, even imitating its volatility” (qtd. in.

(28) 20 Heath 26). This attention to the resemblance between cinema and mental process could also be seen by Rank in his book The Double in which he wrote: “cinematography reminds us in numerous ways of the working of dreams” (Rank 4). Rank’s increasing interest in cinema led him to examine the motifs of the double in art and literature. Later on, moreover, he published Art and Artists (German: Kunst und Künstler, 1932). According to Packer, because Rank referenced The Student of Prague in this book, this film became part of the study materials and “was shown to students of psychiatry from then on” (“Movies and the Modern Psyche” 144). Although his contemporary psychoanalysts such as Rank (who was a member of Freud’s inner circle) had a positive attitude towards films, Freud himself kept a distance from the cinema. In 1925, Austrian director Georg Wilhelm Pabst (1885-1967) wanted to make a film about psychoanalysis which was later known as Secrets of a Soul (1926). Pabst intended to present real psychoanalytic case histories in the film, so he reached out to Freud for cooperation, yet got rejected. The director then turned to Freud’s disciples, Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs. The two gladly accepted the offer to collaborate and became the “scientific advisors” of the film (Heath 26). Though never participating in the production of the film, Freud still felt the need to declare his stance, stating that “there is no avoiding the film, any more than one can avoid the fashion for hair cut in a bob; I, however, will not let my hair be cut and will personally have nothing to do with this film” (qtd. in Heath 27). Freud’s main concern was with the representability of psychoanalysis. He did not believe that cinema could truthfully represent psychoanalysis. In a letter to Abraham to object to the film project, Freud explained: “I do not believe that satisfactory plastic representation of our abstractions is at all possible” (qtd. in Lebeau 34). To Freud, as pointed out by Heath, “psychoanalysis is more than film can show and film’s showing troubles psychoanalysis” (29)..

(29) . 21 Despite the psychoanalytic founding father’s objection, filmmakers still attempted to. portray psychoanalysis. In the late 1950s, twenty years after Freud passed away, American director John Huston (1906-1987) wanted to make a film about Freud, focusing on his “heroic period of discovery when he abandoned hypnosis and gradually invented psychoanalysis” (Lebeau 62). Therefore, Huston turned to the French philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). Despite the dispute between Huston and Sartre during the production,3 the film Freud: The Secret Passion finally came out in 1962. Though being a “commercial failure” at that time (Lebeau 62), Freud: The Secret Passion made quite a few contributions to both psychoanalysis and cinema. Firstly, during the process of treating a hysteria patient Cäcilie Körtner, Freud was portrayed as a “metteur en scène” (Walker 174)—a director. When Cäcilie was talking about her childhood experience (or dream) with her father, Freud, by asking questions like “What happened to you?”, tried to evoke the patient’s (usually traumatized) memories. By using his voice, as pointed out by Lebeau, Freud “is able to conduct the image: to undo, or re-do, the past” (68), which is similar to a director’s role to orchestrate images. And after recalling those memories, the patient is “cured.” This plot of “sudden and dramatic recovery from mental illness” (Gabbard and Gabbard 28) reminds us of Suzanne in the Le Mystère des roches de Kador. Secondly, by using techniques such as flashback and voice-off—“tools of memory and narrative in film” (Lebeau 69)—this film reconstructed the analytic process in Freud’s consulting room. When Cäcilie was describing her dream, for example, what the audience see on the screen is the image of Cäcilie’s dream and what they hear is the voice-off of Freud and. 3. In 1958, Huston invited Sartre to write a screenplay on Freud. After Sartre sent out his screenplay, Huston asked for alterations and cuts. Eventually, the screenplay was transformed considerably by two film professionals closed to Huston, Charles Kaufmann and Wolfgang Reinhardt; and thus, Sartre insisted that his name should not be listed among the film credits. Through this incident, it is clear that there was a lack of consensus between the two. Sartre asserted in an interview that “Huston did not understand what the unconscious was,” whereas Huston said that Sartre “has no idea of what the film medium actually requires” (qtd. in Lebeau 62)..

(30) 22 Cäcilie talking in the analytic room. In this way, when watching this scene, the audience is actually experiencing Cäcilie’s situation during the analytic process. The third contribution made by the film is that it sheds light on the analogy between cinema and dream. Because cinema can create illusions, films can actually “mime the experience of the dream” (Lebeau 65). In Freud: The Secret Passion, when Cäcilie was describing her dream, the audience is watching from the point of view of the dreaming Cäcilie. Sartre also wrote in the script, “as she describes her dream, we see it as she describes it”—“we see what she dreams” (Lebeau 65). Cinema’s ability to represent dreams accounts for the concept of “the dream screen.” The concept of dream screen was introduced by American psychoanalyst Bertram Lewin (1896-1971). In his article “Sleep, the Mouth, and the Dream Screen” (1946), Lewin defined the dream screen as “the surface on which a dream appears to be projected. It is the blank background, present in the dream though not necessarily seen, and the visually perceived action of ordinary manifest dream contents takes place on it or before it” (420). Lewin described that when the infant falls asleep during breastfeeding, on his/her dream screen could be the hallucinatory representation of the mother’s breast as “the representative of the wish to sleep” (421). The concept of “dream screen” was later expanded in the psychoanalytic film theory in the 1970s, as theorists brought in Lacanian theory and comprehended cinema screen as a mirror. Judging from these films and events occurring in the early interactions of psychoanalysis and cinema, we can say that, to use Lebeau’s words, “psychoanalysis and cinema are already together” (8); and the later establishment of psychoanalytic film theory could be described as the “culmination of a long flirtation” (Stam 159)..

(31) . 23. Psychoanalytic Film Theory Starting from the 1970s, the development of psychoanalytic film theory bore witness to yet another wave of interactions between cinema and psychoanalysis. Different from the earlier attempts by filmmakers such as Pabst and Huston, whose efforts aimed primarily to capture the process of psychoanalysis in cinematic productions, psychoanalytic film theorists in the 1970s such as Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, and Laura Mulvey, tended to draw on psychoanalytic concepts to comprehend the production and reception of films. The early 1970s saw the publication of two essays on cinematic apparatus: “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” (French: “Effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil de base”) and “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema” (French: “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité”) which were published in Cinéthique in 1970 and in Communications in 1975 respectively, both written by the French author Jean-Louis Baudry (1930-2015). Though both being translated into English as “apparatus,” the two French terms are in fact different: “l’appareil de base” in the first article refers to the mechanisms during recording, editing and projecting a film while “le dispositif” in the second article refers to the screening situation which includes the film and the viewer (Quendler 15). These two articles laid the groundwork for the development of the apparatus theory. Baudry introduced the concept of cinema as an apparatus which consists of camera, projector, and screen. In “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Baudry compared the functioning between cinema and ideology and proposed that cinema can appear as a “psychic apparatus of substitution, corresponding to the model defined by the dominant ideology” (“Ideological Effects” 364). Although the article, as the title suggests, mostly put emphasis on discussing the ideological effects of cinema, Baudry also attended to psychical aspects, such as transformations, in the examination of cinematic apparatus. For.

(32) 24 example, Baudry discussed the transformations which cannot be perceived by viewers but take place in the cinematic apparatus. First, the cinematic apparatus transforms the raw material (“objective reality”) into the finished product (a film), and camera takes up “an intermediate position” in the production process (“Ideological Effects” 356). Camera transforms the objective reality in which the actors and actresses perform into a series of images that the audience see on the screen. Second, in a film, each frame needs to be different in order to generate a continuous action. However, when putting all these different frames together and projecting them as a unity, the cinematic apparatus has to efface differences between frames so as to make meaning possible. Thus, film, to quote Baudry’s words, “lives on the denial of difference: difference is necessary for it to live, but it lives on its negation” (“Ideological Effects” 359). In addition, to create the impression of movement and continuity relies on a projector’s ability to show several frames per second (fps) and the persistence of vision, which is an optical illusion of the human eyes. Therefore, a projector and screen can create an illusion of movement, transforming still photographs into moving pictures. After introducing the cinematic apparatus, Baudry continued the examination of cinema in his second article: “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema.” This time, he concentrated on the impression of reality in cinema and compared the resemblances and differences between cinema and dream. The similarities between the two are that both offer visual experiences, including the projection of images on a “screen” (cinema screen and dream screen), and both are hallucinatory by nature. Although having much likeness, dream and cinema are different, first, in terms of the participants’ ability to withdraw. In cinema, if the spectator wants to exit the cinematic world, he “has always the choice to close his eyes, to withdraw from the spectacle, or to leave” (“The Apparatus” 220); however, in a dream, the dreamer cannot exit the dream world by.

(33) . 25. choice. Secondly, though both herald in hallucinatory states, dream according to Freud is a “normal hallucinatory psychosis,” yet cinema is an “artificial” one (“The Apparatus” 221). Thirdly, the dreamer can “perceive” the representations in dreams as the reality without actually “perceiving”; however, the viewer “require[s] the mediation of perception” so as to actually “perceive” the representations in cinema as the reality (“The Apparatus” 222). Baudry concluded that “cinema is not [a] dream,” but the impression of reality created in the cinematic apparatus is “comparable” to the impression of reality produced by dreams (“The Apparatus” 222). In his two essays on the cinematic apparatus, Baudry also discussed the concept of the screen, which encouraged the development of mirror-screen theory. Following Lewin’s theory of dream screen, Baudry extended the discussion to the screen’s function to engage the spectator. Borrowing the mirror stage theory from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), Baudry compared the cinema screen to a mirror. Lacan described how an infant from the age of six months could be attracted by its reflection in the mirror, and eventually identify itself with the mirror-image. According to Baudry, for both film viewing and the mirror stage experiences, there is a “suspension of mobility” on the side of the viewer (“Ideological Effects” 363). When watching a film, the spectator usually sits still in front of a screen, just as the infant is immobile in front of the mirror. Secondly, in both film-viewing and mirror stage experience is the “predominance of the visual function” (“Ideological Effects” 363). Both the cinema spectator and the infant are attracted to visual images. Indeed, Baudry pointed out that the cinematic screen serves a similar function to that of a mirror. As the reflection in a mirror gives the infant an integrated self-image, the cinema spectator identifies himself as the omnipotent camera that sees everything. However, the two are not exactly the same for the image in the mirror is the reflection of the infant’s body, yet the images on the screen are products of cinema-making. Baudry described the difference.

(34) 26 between the cinema screen and the mirror by saying that “the paradoxical nature of the cinematic mirror-screen is without [a] doubt that it reflects images but not “reality”” (“Ideological Effects” 362). Baudry’s point was further developed by Christian Metz (1931-1993). In 1975, Metz published a long essay, “The Imaginary Signifier” (French: “Le signifiant imaginaire”), in an issue of Communications devoted to the theme of psychoanalysis and cinema in which Baudry’s second article on apparatus also appeared. In 1982, Metz’s essay was translated into English and published as a book titled The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Building upon Baudry’s analogy between the cinema screen and the mirror of the mirror stage, Metz made a turn and brought in the theory of semiotics. Metz introduced the concept of “cinematic signifier” by comparing the meaning-making abilities between written or spoken language and cinema. As suggested by the title of his book, Metz conceived cinematic signifiers as imaginary, which refers to cinema’s “ability to invoke absence, i.e. the capacity to image a thing is there where it ostensibly is not there” (Bettinson and Rushton 43). For Metz, not only the images presented by cinema (cinematic signifier) are imaginary, but the ways cinema presents these images are also imaginary: “What is characteristic of the cinema is not the imaginary that it may happen to represent, but the imaginary that it is from the start, the imaginary that constitutes it as a signifier” (Metz 44). Based on cinema’s imaginary nature, Metz compared the imaginary effects taking place in cinema and in that of the mirror stage. In the mirror stage, the infant takes the reflected mirror image as his imaginary body; likewise, in cinema, the images and sounds also generate an imaginary effect: if a spectator believes that the story is “real” and immerses him/herself in the cinematic world, he/she is engrossed in the cinema’s imaginary effect. As pointed out by Metz, the spectator experiences “a series of mirror-effects” (51). The cinema screen is not a mirror, but it can produce imaginary effects similar to that of the mirror at the mirror stage..

(35) . 27 In the mid-1970s, British filmmaker and scholar Laura Mulvey published a. provocative essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), which became the foundational text of the gaze theory. In this essay, Mulvey utilized psychoanalytic theory as a “political weapon” to demonstrate how the patriarchal unconscious of our society has structured film form and shaped our film watching experience (14). Mulvey pointed out that the pleasure of film-viewing is usually shaped by an “active/men passive/women” dichotomy: men assume an active role and gain pleasure in looking, while women take a passive position and connote “to-be-looked-at-ness” (“Visual Pleasure” 19). Mulvey believed that such a gender inequality is not only portrayed in cinema but also reinforced by cinema, especially the Hollywood cinema. She then drew on two psychoanalytic theories to specify that Hollywood films consolidate this gender imbalance. First, cinema supports scopophilia, and second, cinema encourages spectators’ identification with male characters. Scopophilia refers to gaining pleasure in looking at another person as an object of sexual stimulation. In films, women are often displayed as sexual objects, either as erotic objects for the characters within the diegesis, or as erotic objects for the spectator in a theater (Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure” 19). Moreover, due to the male dominant narrative structure, by identifying with the male protagonists, spectators can also gain control of the film narrative and receive a satisfying sense of omnipotence. Mulvey thus came to a conclusion that “male gaze” is to view female figures as sexual objects and gain pleasure from the act of looking. “Visual Pleasure” became a very influential essay in psychoanalytic film theories, but some scholars questioned that Mulvey “only used the male third person singular to stand in for the spectator” (Mulvey, “Afterthoughts” 29) and overlooked the position of female spectators. In order to clarify her position, Mulvey published in 1981 another essay titled “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946).” Mulvey clarified that “Visual Pleasure” was to discuss “the relationship.

(36) 28 between the image of woman on the screen and the ‘masculinisation’ of the spectator position, regardless of the actual sex (or possible deviance) of any real live movie-goer” (“Afterthoughts” 29). In “Afterthoughts,” Mulvey then moved on to examine the female spectatorship, especially the ones who “may find herself secretly, unconsciously almost, enjoying the freedom of action and control over the diegetic world that identification with a hero provides” (29). Following Mulvey’s two articles, scholars including E. Ann Kaplan and bell hooks started studying the plurality of gazes. Kaplan discussed the concept of female gaze in her essay “Is the Gaze Male?” (1983). As pointed out by Kaplan, “our culture is deeply committed to myths of demarcated sex differences, called “masculine” and “feminine,” which in turn revolve first on a complex gaze apparatus and second on dominancesubmission patterns” (29). To exercise gaze in the films, “the woman takes on the “masculine” role as bearer of the gaze and initiator of the action” (29). Kaplan concluded that to own and gain control of the gaze, which is not necessarily male, female spectator have to be in the “masculine” position. Along with the consideration for female gaze, the African-American feminist bell hooks discussed the oppositional gaze in the chapter “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” of her book Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992). bell hooks criticized the early feminist gaze theory for failing to notice the black female spectatorship. She pointed out that Looking at films with an oppositional gaze, black women were able to critically assess the cinema’s construction of white womanhood as object of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with either the victim or the perpetrator. Black female spectators, who refused to identify with white womanhood, who would not take on the phallocentric gaze of desire and possession, created a critical space where the.

(37) . 29 binary opposition Mulvey posits of “woman as image, man as bearer of the look” was continually deconstructed. (122-23) With more attention being given to female figures and female spectatorship, the. feminist film theory flourished in the 1980s and 1990s. Some film theorists turned to different aspects of psychoanalytic theory. For example, the British feminist scholar Elizabeth Cowie wrote an essay “Fantasia” (1984) in which she drew on the Freudian notion of fantasy. As described by Cowie, fantasy sets up one’s desire and entails a change in one’s relations with other people. When identifying in the cinema, according to Cowie, “we [the spectators] do not take the character’s desire as our own, but identify with the character’s position of desire in relation to other characters” (140). Besides drawing on feminist thoughts, psychoanalytic film theory continues to expand with influences from other disciplines such as queer theory and post-colonialism. Some queer film theorists criticized the heterosexual assumptions in the feminist film theory. In How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video (1991) edited by Bad Object-Choices, for example, Judith Mayne discussed the lesbian spectatorship in her article “Lesbian Looks: Dorothy Arzner and Female Authorship” (1991). Also, Valerie Traub analyzed lesbian’s pleasure in looking in her essay “The Ambiguities of “Lesbian” Viewing Pleasure: The (Dis)articulations of Black Widow” (1991). As film theorist Barbara Creed pointed out, unlike early film theorists who focused on “praising ‘positive’ and decrying ‘negative’ images of homosexual men and lesbians in film” (88), queer film theorists, by reinterpreting psychoanalysis, expanded their discussion to the assumptions of abnormality, perversion, and pathology. In a similar way, post-colonial theorists also made a methodological shift by introducing psychoanalysis into post-colonial theories. Built on earlier scholars’ attention to racism and stereotypes in relation to narrative credibility (Creed 87), post-colonial theorists moved a step further to discuss the process of subjectification and representation of otherness.

(38) 30 in films. For example, in his essay “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse” published in Screen in 1983, Homi Bhabha analyzed racial stereotypes in colonial discourse by drawing analogy between fetishism and racial stereotype. According to Freud, a fetish is a substitute for penis. A boy’s realization of his mother’s and other women’s “lack” of a penis evokes his fear of castration. In order to relieve his castration anxiety, the boy finds in a fetish (such as a piece of cloth or a woman’ feet or legs) to cover up the lack and hence avoid anxiety. Similarly, in the colonial discourse, skin colors and racial stereotypes are often drawn up by the colonizers as fetishes to consolidate their differences from the colonized and hence shed off anxiety. While Homi Bhabha attempted to “bring together the social and the psychic” (Creed 87), Slavoj Žižek linked cinema and psychoanalysis by using “films as the material with which to explicate psychoanalysis” (Heath 36). For instance, Žižek stated that his book Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out is “an attempt to introduce the doctrine of Jacques Lacan to the American public via Hollywood cinema” (vii). Žižek made use of the presentation form of cinema to elucidate the inarticulate psychoanalytic concepts, which further consolidated the practicability of using cinema as a medium to translate psychoanalysis.. Contemporary Psychoanalytic Films The interaction between psychoanalysis and cinema has continued into the 21st century. In fact, the prevalence of psychoanalytic films and TV dramas in the current market is remarkable. One example is the Israeli television drama BeTipul (Hebrew: ‫בטיפול‬, 20052008). This TV series depicts the life of a psychologist, including his weekly sessions with patients and also the sessions with his own therapist at the end of the week. The drama series has been adapted for audiences in over fourteen countries such as the United States, Russia,.

(39) . 31. Argentina, Brazil, Portugal, Italy and Japan; and its great success has indicated audience’s interest in psychoanalytic treatment. Contemporary American films incline towards reviewing and rethinking the relationship of psychoanalysts and their patients. For example, in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010),4 the main character, Edward “Teddy” Daniels, whom was assumed to be a detective at the beginning of the film turned out to be the “most dangerous patient.” Brad Anderson’s Stonehearst Asylum (2014)5 is another film that questions the psychoanalytic medical system. Due to a revolt led by patients, the roles of doctors and patients are reversed in the Stonehearst Asylum. Compared with earlier psychoanalytic films that usually focus on the treatment process in analytic rooms, contemporary films tend to question and criticize psychoanalytic system and question the roles of psychoanalysts in modern health care system. In addition to making films that comment on psychoanalytic methods and the medical structure, filmmakers also endeavor to translate psychoanalytic concepts into films. In 2013, two films touched upon the concept of the double: Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy6 and Richard Ayoade’s The Double.7 In Enemy, a college professor named Adam watches a movie and finds that the actor, Anthony, looks exactly like himself. The encounter between Adam and Anthony creates serious disturbance to their initially separate and independent lives. The topic of the doppelgänger is also explored in The Double. Simon James is a downtrodden office worker, and one day, a new employee named James Simon arrives. These two men have absolutely identical appearance but completely different personalities. One intriguing point advanced in the film is that the two characters live and work in the same environment. 4. Shutter Island is based on Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel of the same title. Stonehearst Asylum is loosely based on the short story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” by Edgar Allan Poe. 6 Enemy is loosely adapted from José Saramago’s 2002 novel The Double (Portuguese: O Homem Duplicado). 7 The Double is based on the novella The Double (Russian: Двойник, Dvoynik) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. 5.