Jacques Derrida

Laura Mulvey is the author of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Where she uses psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan, to critique Hollywood films. A very big argument that she pursues is Freud’s concept of “Scopophilia”. Which is defined as obtaining a sense of pleasure from observing someone else. Freud compares this to a form of sexual domination. Observing someone without their knowledge, is like possessing a kind of mastery over them. Mulvey takes this concept and compares is to…

The practice of scalping, the removal of the scalp from the head often to be used as a trophy, has long been one of the most enigmatic, contentious, and startling elements of early American history. Often distorted by Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism, understandings of scalping, both past and present, have most commonly presented the practice as the embodiment of Indian savagery and cruelty. Much more than evidence of Indian warfare’s barbarism, however, scalping was a vital part of the nuanced and…

So there was once a group of friends whose names were Nathan, Vern, Carter, and the short fat one Potato. Nathan, Vern, and Carter have been friends for a while as they just met Potato, Potato has always been the weird kid, (Verns perspective) our teacher explained that he moved from a small island called gimwarre but never told us where it's at, when we ask potato he just says “Gimwarre GIN BUFF MCBOOGY”. We always thought he was weird, but one day when we all went out camping and no adults…

II. Lacan On the individual level, the obsession for an identity, for cohesion, is a result of the subject’s development through the mirror stage of life. This stage begins in the early years of one’s life when the child encounters their reflection in the mirror. Upon this first glimpse of oneself from the outside, the child is given an image of her existence which is far more unified and cohesive than their own subjective experience. Instead of the confusing collection of limbs and body parts…

Jacques Lacan’s theory of development explains how infants mature psychologically. The stages of his concept include the Imaginary, the Mirror, and the Symbolic. The first is where children begin to understand control. Babies learn to manipulate their environment as an extension of their own base needs and desires. There is no separation between the baby and the outside world. Following the discovery of control, infants undergo the Mirror stage, where they learn to recognize their own image…

‘The Wasteland’ has been psycho-analytically studied to understand the poet’s psyche, the metaphor of images, symbols, etc. for new untouched and unexplored findings in the genre of practical criticism. The poem has been deciphered on the basis of three psychoanalytic models (a) Lacan’s ‘Language and Unconscious’ (b) C.G. Jung’s ‘Collective Unconscious’ and (c) Northrop Frye’s ‘Archetypal Criticism’. Lacan’s ‘Language and Unconscious’, attempts to read ‘The Wasteland’ in the likeness of…

In Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, Danny Saunders questions the value of raising children in silence. Ironically, due to the fact that Danny’s father has imposed silence upon their relationship, Danny comes to realize how valuable talking can be to his personal growth. By the end of the story, he no longer believes in his father’s strict Hasidic views. The silence between Danny and Reb Saunders forces Danny to find other people to talk to. These people expose him to new ideas, ideas that his father…

Does the word ‘phallus’ refer to the same concept in the writings of both Freud and Lacan? Does Freud’s “substitute for the woman’s penis” (Freud “Fetishism” 842) correlate with Lacan’s “privileged signifier?” (Lacan “Signification” 1187). In The Signification of the Phallus Lacan writes: “it is Freud’s discovery that gives to the signifier / signified opposition the full extent of implications,” crediting Freud with Lacan’s discovery of the phallus as a “privileged signifier” (Lacan…

Critical Reflection #3: Jane Flax (2004) In Flax’s What Is the Subject? Review Essay on Psychoanalysis and Feminism in a Postcolonial Time (2004), she questions whether or not psychoanalytic theory, which is heavily centred on sex and gender identity, would be able to withstand the inclusion of other factors like race. She argues that both feminism and psychoanalysis has been treated expressed through a white, Western, middle class view and has done little to include issues around race and…

Psychoanalytic analysis is an approach to analyzing media artifacts in order to understand how the human drives for pleasure and desire play a role within them (Ott & Mack, 2014). The main premise of psychoanalysis is that people are behaving in a certain way due to the unconscious desires, needs and fears. One of the psychoanalytic elements important to the mass media communication is the male gaze theory. In this paper, I will explore how the male gaze is challenged and why are there…