Castration Anxiety and Penis Envy

Castration Anxiety
Castration anxiety is the fear of emasculation in both the literal and metaphorical sense.

Literal
Castration anxiety is the conscious of unconscious fear of losing all or part of the sex organs, or the function of such.
In Freudian psychoanalysis, castration anxiety refers to an unconscious fear of penile loss originating during the phallic stage of sexual development and lasting a lifetime. According to Freud, when the infantile male becomes aware of differences between male and female genitalia he assumes that the female's penis has been removed and becomes anxious that his penis will be cut off by his rival, the father figure, as punishment for desiring the mother figure.

Metaphorical
Symbolic castration anxiety refers to the fear of being degraded, dominated or made insignificant, usually an irrational fear where the person will go to extreme lengths to save their pride and/or perceives trivial things as being degrading making their anxiety restrictive and sometimes damaging. this can also tie in with literal castration anxiety in fearing the loss of virility or sexual dominance.

Penis Envy
Penis envy in Freudian psychoanalysis refers to the theorised reaction of a girl during her psychosexual development to the realization that she does not have a penis. Freud considered this realisation a defining moment in the development of gender and sexual identity for women. In contemporary culture, the term sometimes refers inexactly or metaphorically to women who are presumed to wish they were men.

The theory suggests that the penis becomes the organ of principal interest to both sexes in the phallic stage. This becomes the catalyst for a series of pivotal events in psychosexual development. These events, known as the Oedipus complex for boys, and the Electra complex for girls, result in significantly different outcomes for each gender because of differences in anatomy.

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artefact.
Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.

Surrealist Cinema
Related to Dada cinema, Surrealist cinema is characterised by juxtapositions, the rejection of dramatic psychology, and a frequent use of shocking imagery. Surrealism draws upon irrational imagery and the subconscious mind. Surrealists should not, however, be mistaken as whimsical or incapable of logical thought; rather, most Surrealists promote themselves as revolutionaries. 
Surrealism was the first literary and artistic movement to become seriously associated with cinema, though it has also been a movement largely neglected by film critics and historians

Dada 
Dada or Dadaism was an art movement that sprang up in Zurich Switzerland roughly around 1916. It emerged largely in response to the atrocities and insanity of World War 1, and sought to find and experiment with new forms of expression in an attempt to rejuvenate the creative act. After the end of the war in 1918, Dada spread to Germany (Berlin, Cologne, Hanover), where it was to rebel against the increasingly militaristic and nationalistic policies of the emerging far right as typified by the eventual rise to power of Hitler's Nazi party. 
Dada was important in an Art historical context in that it paved the way and laid the foundations for surrealism which was to follow. Many of the artists active in Dada later becoming influential and active within surrealism. Dada groups existed in several forms for longer and shorter periods in other areas such in Paris, Italy, the Netherlands and New York. 

Lacan - Lack, Desire, Drives and Other/other

 Lack
Lack is a concept that is always related to desire. Lacan distinguishes between three kinds of lack, according to the nature of the object which is lacking.

        - Symbolic Castration and its object related is the Imaginary Phallus; 

Symbolic castration anxiety refers to the fear of being degraded, dominated or made insignificant, usually an irrational fear where the person will go to extreme lengths to save their pride and/or perceives trivial things as being degrading making their anxiety restrictive and sometimes damaging.

         - Imaginary Frustration and its object related is the Real Breast; 

         - Real Privation and its object related is the Symbolic Phallus. 

The symbolic phallus is the concept of being the ultimate man, and having this is compared to having the divine gift of God.

The three corresponding agents are the Real Father, the Symbolic Mother, and the Imaginary Father. Of these three forms of lack, castration is the most important from the perspective of the cure.

Other/other 

The little other is the other who is not really other, but a reflection and projection of the Ego.  The little other is thus entirely inscribed in the imaginary order. The big Other designates radical alterity, an other-ness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. The big Other is inscribed in the order of the symbolic. Indeed, the big Other is the symbolic insofar as it is particularised for each subject. The Other is thus both another subject, in his radical alterity and unassimilable uniqueness, and also the symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that other subject.

We can speak of the Other as a subject in a secondary sense only when a subject occupies this position and thereby embodies the Other for another subject.

In arguing that speech originates not in the Ego nor in the subject but rather in the Other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond the subject's conscious control. They come from another place, outside of consciousness—"the unconscious is the discourse of the Other." When conceiving the Other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of psychical locality, in which the unconscious is described as "the other scene".

Desire

A lack is what causes desire to arise. Lack and desire are synonymous. When you do not have something and feel a sense of loss, then you are actually feeling desire for that lost thing. Lack implies an incomplete and unachievable wholeness. The resultant desire is a haunting ache that is more than the lust for something more achievable. Desire relates to the need to possess, to have, to own, to control. We thus lust after people and possessions. 

It is important to distinguish between desire and the drives. Even though they both belong to the field of the Other, desire is one, whereas the drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire. Desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack.

 Lacan writes that "the unconscious is the discourse of the Other." Even our unconscious desires are, in other words, organized by the linguistic system that Lacan terms the symbolic order or "the big Other." In a sense, then, our desire is never properly our own, but is created through fantasies that are caught up in cultural ideologies rather than material sexuality. For this reason, according to Lacan, the command that the superego directs to the subject is, of all things, "Enjoy!" That which we may believe to be most private and rebellious (our desire) is, in fact, regulated, even commanded, by the superego.

Drives

Drives differ from biological needs because they can never be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually around it. 

Lacan incorporates the four elements of the drives as defined by Freud (the pressure, the end, the object and the source) to his theory of the drive's circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous zone, circles round the object, and returns to the erogenous zone. The three grammatical voices structure this circuit:

1. the active voice (to see)
2. the reflexive voice (to see oneself)
3. the passive voice (to be seen)

The active and reflexive voices are autoerotic—they lack a subject. It is only when the drive completes its circuit with the passive voice that a new subject appears. Despite being the "passive" voice, the drive is essentially active: "to make oneself be seen" rather than "to be seen." The circuit of the drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the pleasure principle.

Lacan - The Mirror Stage and Imaginary, Symbolic and Real Order

Imaginary, Symbolic and Real Order

Imaginary Order
Of these three terms, The Imaginary was the first to appear. The basis of the Imaginary order is the formation of the ego in the Mirror Stage.  The Imaginary becomes the internalized image of this ideal, whole, self and is situated around the notion of coherence rather than fragmentation. The Imaginary can roughly be aligned with the formation of the ego which serves as the mediator (as in Freud) between the internal and the external world. It becomes, in Lacan, the space in which the relation "between the ego and its images" is developed.The relationship whereby the ego is constituted by identification is a locus of alienation, which is another feature of The Imaginary, and is fundamentally narcissistic. 

Symbolic Order
The Symbolic Order functions as the way in which the subject is organized and, to a certain extent, how the psyche becomes accessible. The symbolic opposition between "presence" and "absence" implies the possibility that something may be missing from The Symbolic. In contrast to The Imaginary, The Symbolic involves the formation of signifiers and language and is considered to be the "determining order of the subject". Seeing the entire system of the unconscious/conscious as manifesting in an endless web of signifiers/ieds and associations.

Real Order
The Real refers to that which is authentic, the unchangeable truth in reference both to the Self and the external dimension of experience. This order is not only opposed to The Imaginary but is also located beyond The Symbolic. Unlike The Symbolic, which is constituted in terms of oppositions such as "presence" and "absence", there is no absence in The Real.
         The Real becomes that which resists representation, what is pre-mirror, pre-imaginary, pre-symbolic – what cannot be symbolized – what loses it’s "reality" once it is symbolized (made conscious) through language. It is the aspect where words fail, what is described as, "the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic". This is perhaps the source of the most contention within theories of media in that media itself can only point at The Real but never embody it, never be it.  

The Mirror Stage

Lacan's mirror stage is based on his belief that infants recognize themselves in a mirror (literal) or other symbolic contraption which induces apperception (the turning of oneself into an object that can be viewed by the child from outside of himself) from the age of about six months. Later research showed that, although children are fascinated with images of themselves and others in mirrors from about that age, they do not begin to recognize that the images in the mirror are reflections of their own bodies until the age of about 15 to 18 months.
         By the early 1950s, Lacan's concept of the mirror stage had evolved: he no longer considered the mirror stage as a moment in the life of the infant, but as representing a permanent structure of subjectivity, or as the paradigm of Imaginary Order. 
         According to Lacan, when the infant stumbles upon a mirror, she is suddenly bombarded with an image of herself as whole, stable and autonomous self; an ideal image of herself that does not correspond with the infant's primordial reality of existing as a fragmented entity with libidinal needs. The image itself in the mirror is described by Lacan as the "Ideal-I", an identification that the infant spends a lifelong quest to correspond wholly with.  
       According to Lacan, this quest can never be fulfilled, because human existence is in essence a striving for a never-attainable perfection. Lacan does not put a positive spin on this observation: while the mirror stage allows human individuals to come to know themselves as "I", by establishing a permanent split within the subject's self-image, this process also lays the foundation for forms of psychic distress such as anxiety, neurosis, and psychosis. 
        It becomes a process of identification of internal self with that external image. The mirror stage thus represents the infant’s first encounter with subjectivity, with spatial relations, with an external sense of coherence, and with a sense of "I" and "You."

Freud - Id, Ego and Super-ego

According to Freud's psychoanalytic theory of personality, personality is composed of three elements. These three elements of personality -the id, the ego and the superego- work together to create complex human behaviour. According to Freud, the key to a healthy personality is a balance between the id, the ego, and the superego.

The Id
it is said that the id is the only component of the personality that's present from birth. this part of  the personality is completely unconscious and possesses the instinctive and primitive behaviours, concerned only with fulfilling pleasure.

The id is driven by the pleasure principle, which strives for immediate gratification of all desires, wants and needs. the result of these needs not being met is tension. An example of this is if we are hungry an immediate reaction is to eat. The id is an important aspect of an infants life, because it ensures that their needs are met. if the child is hungry, thirsty or uncomfortable the infant will cry until these needs are met.

Key word: want

Pleasure Principle 
The pleasure principle strives to fulfil our most basic and primitive urges, including hunger, thirst, anger and sex. When these needs are not met, the result is a state of anxiety or tension. However, immediately stratifying these need is not always realistic. If we were completely ruled by the pleasure principle  we might find ourselves grabbing things we want out of other people's hands to satisfy our own cravings. As this sort of behaviour would be seen and socially unacceptable this is where the superego is introduced.

The Ego
The ego is the component of personality that is responsible for dealing with reality and is based on the reality principle. According to Freud, the ego develops from the id and ensures that the impulses of the id can be expressed in a manner acceptable in the real world. The ego functions in both the conscious,preconscious, and unconscious mind. The ego is capable of understanding that desires may vary from person to person, and is willing to make the consideration that ones own desire and actions have effects, whether positive or negative, and tries to balance out thinking before carrying out decisions/actions. 

Key word: balance

Reality Principle
The ego operates based on the reality principle, which strives to satisfy the id's desires in realistic and socially appropriate ways. The reality principle weighs the costs and benefits of an action before deciding to act upon or abandon impulses. In many cases, the id's impulses can be satisfied through a process of delayed gratification--the ego will eventually allow the behaviour, but only in the appropriate time and place.


The Superego
The last component of personality to develop is the superego. The superego is the aspect of personality based on moral principle, that holds all of our internalised moral standards and ideals that we acquire from both parents and society; a sense of right and wrong. The superego is concerned with what other will think, and stands in opposition to the id,  providing guidelines for making judgements. According to Freud, the superego begins to emerge at around age five and acts to perfect and civilise our behaviour.  It works to suppress all unacceptable urges of the id and struggles to make the ego act upon idealistic standards rather that upon realistic principles. The superego is present in the conscious, preconscious and unconscious.

Key words: morals, compromise

Moral Principle
The moral principle strives to accomplish the rule and standards approved by parental and society authority figures. When these rules are obeyed it leads to feelings of pride, value and accomplishment. however the conscience includes information about things that are viewed as bad by parents and society. these behaviours are often forbidden and lead to bad consequences, punishments or feelings of guilt and remorse.


The Id, Ego and Superego Working Together
According to Freud, a healthy individual will have developed a strongest ego to keep the id and superego in check. If the id becomes too strong, impulses and desires may become overwhelming - resulting in a selfish, inconsiderate individual. However if the superego is too strong, an individual may feel excessive rigid moral constraints that result in judgemental individuals. Both extremes strain the interpersonal relationship.

Introduction to Psychoanalytical Studies

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is the method of psychological and personality therapy in which free association, dream interpretation, and analysis of resistance and transference are used to explore repressed or unconscious impulses, anxieties, and internal conflicts, in order to free psychic energy for mature love and work.

The basic principles of psychoanalysis include the following:

1. beside the inherited constitution of personality, a person's development is determined by events in early childhood;
2. human behavior, experience, and cognition are largely determined by irrational drives;
3. those drives are largely unconscious;
4. attempts to bring those drives into awareness meet psychological resistance in the form of defence mechanisms;
5. conflicts between conscious and unconscious (repressed) material can result in mental disturbances such as neurosis, neurotic traits, anxiety, depression etc.;
6. the liberation from the effects of the unconscious material is achieved through bringing this material into the conscious mind (via e.g. skilled guidance).

  
Sigmund Freud
The idea of psychoanalysis came into full prominence under Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, where he formulated his own theory of psychoanalysis. Freud had become aware of the existence of mental processes that were not conscious as a result of his neurological consulting job. 









Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan's work featured the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, identification, and language as subjective perception. His ideas have had a significant impact on critical theory, literal theory, 20th century French philosophy, sociology, feminist theory, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis.




Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist. Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. Her article is one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework, influenced by the theories of Freud and Lacan.







Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek  is a Slovene philosopher and cultural critic who has made major contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis, among other disciplines.

Methods Of Montage

Metric

Where the editing follows a specific number of frames (based purely on the physical nature of time), cutting to the next shot no matter what is happening within the image. This montage is used to elicit the most basal and emotional of reactions in the audience. 

Example from Eisenstein's October.

Rhythmic 

Includes cutting based on time, but using the visual composition of the shots, along with a change in the speed of the metric cuts, to induce more complex meanings than what is possible with metric montage. Once sound was introduced, rhythmic montage also included audial elements (music, dialogue, sounds). 

Example from The Battleship Potemkin

Tonal 

A tonal montage uses the emotional meaning of the shots - not just manipulating the temporal length of the cuts or its rhythmical characteristics - to elicit a reaction from the audience even more complex than from the metric or rhythmic montage. For example, a sleeping baby would emote calmness and relaxation. 

Example from Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin. 

Overtonal/Associational 

The overtonal montage is the accumulation of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage to synthesize its effect on the audience for an even more abstract and complicated effect. 

Example from Eisenstein's Strike

Intellectual 

Uses shots which, combined, elicit an intellectual meaning. Intellectual montage examples from Eisenstein's October and Strike. In Strike, a shot of striking workers being attacked cut with a shot of a bull being slaughtered creates a film metaphor suggesting that the workers are being treated like cattle. This meaning does not exist in the individual shots; it only arises when they are juxtaposed.

Example from Eisenstein's Strike

Parallel editing

Parallel editing is a technique that allows two or more simultaneous sets of action to happen within a single film sequence. Its main uses are to; create tension, show more vantage points and can create dramatic irony. 

Crosscutting

Crosscutting is a technique that pieces together sequence that at occur at the same time, but in different places in order to create narrative tension. Crosscutting’s most famous practitioner was W.D.Griffiths, his collaboration of films contain textbook examples of crosscutting. Some of his pieces of work that include this editing type are; A Corner in Wheat and The Lonedale Operator.

Motivated Editing

In its most basic form, a motivated edit is one that alludes to something not in the frame and then cuts to that item or event. If you accept that any edit breaks the illusion of continuity, then we put forth that the motivated edit is one of the least jarring forms of transition. For this reason, it is used often in Hollywood-style narrative filmmaking. In its most basic form, a motivated edit is one that alludes to something not in the frame and then cuts to that item or event. You see it all the time in horror films: a woman is standing in a spooky place all alone and then hears a startling sound. She spins her head around and sees nothing. The sound then comes from another area, and the soon-to-be victim jerks her head in that direction. Eventually, the viewing audience gets to see the object of terror, usually along with a loud, startling sound. 

Shot- Reverse Shot

Shot reverse shot (or shot/countershot) is a film technique where one character is shown looking at another character (often off-screen), and then the other character is shown looking back at the first character. Since the characters are shown facing in opposite directions, the viewer assumes that they are looking at each other.

Example from The Hunger Games