The Machinist

Film Summary
Trevor Reznik is a lathe-operator who suffers from insomnia and hasn't slept in a year. Slowly, he begins to doubt his sanity as increasingly bizarre things start happening at work and at home. Haunted by a deformed co-worker who no one seems to think exists, and an ongoing stream of indecipherable Post-It notes he keeps finding on his fridge, he attempts to investigate what appears to be a mysterious plot against him and, in the process, embroils two women in his madness.




Film Analysis
Insomnia - The insomnia helps to emphasis the ending where Trevor is eventually able to sleep and has over come the guilt of the superego by conforming to societies rules. but also shows how the guilt is causing Trevor's life to be drastically effected and like the weight loss, how the subconscious is punishing Trevor.

Hallucinations - The guilt caused insomnia brings on hallucinations (of Maria and Nicholas; the game of hangman; Ivan), that at first seem to have no connection or purpose, but as the film unravels, all the pieces are put together. The hallucinations resemble the structure of a dream where direct information from the id  is disguised (like when Ivan says to Trevor a storm is coming, meaning metaphorically an internal storm is coming) so that the superego doesn't become disgusted with the id's desires and drive (hiding the fact that he killed somebody). The dream like structure is ironic considering that the character of Trevor has not slept in over a year.

Ivan - the character Ivan represents Trevor's id trying to escape and control Trevor's life. The fact that nobody else can see Ivan shows how the desires and drives of the id are specific to Trevor and will vary from person to person. Ivan represents what Trevor used to be; confident, free spirited man, of a weight. the two characters, Trevor and Ivan, are physically and mentally opposite, thus representing the opposite id and superego.

Weight Lose - Trevor's weight lose is his unconscious superego punishing him for being involved in a hit and run and following his ids instinct to flee from the sense. The weight loss shows physically how the guilt is eating away at Trevor.

Film Title, Job and OCD - the title of the film and Trevor's job are ironic, in the sense that they represent a well oil, and smooth running process, where as Trevor's life is far from this. the job helps to emphasis the chaos, and down fall of Trevor's life and mental state. This is also seen by how Trevor tries to install order to his life with routines and traits of OCD's - continuously weighting himself and leaving notes.
All of this order among chaos can be seen as Trevor's superego trying find order and conform to societies ways; trying to over come the id's animal instincts of killing (the accidental murder of the young boy). The fact the the notes Trevor use to help bring order to his life become apart of his hallucinations and the 'conspiracy' against him, helps to show how gradually throughout the film Trevor's mental state is overridden  by the guilt, conjured by the superego not being able to follow societies rules - of not killing.

Prostitute - the character of Stevie shows to the audience that even though Trevor if going through a traumatic time and his guilt is clearly taking over, due to his superego, not all of his id desires can be over ruled. Stevie shows that the natural animal instinct of sex, created by the id, will always be there.

The Ending - Trevor is finally able to sleep when he confesses to the police that he was involved in a hit and run. the fact that he if able to sleep at the end shows that not the superego has been satisfied  by finally obeying the rules put in place by society.

The Birds

Film Summary
Spoiled socialite and notorious practical joker Melanie Daniels is shopping in a San Francisco pet store when she meets Mitch Brenner, who is looking to buy a pair of love birds for his young sister's birthday; he recognizes Melanie but pretends to mistake her for an assistant. She decides to get her own back by buying the birds and driving up to the quiet coastal town of Bodega Bay, where Mitch spends his weekends with his sister and mother. Shortly after she arrives, Melanie is attacked by a gull, but this is just the start of a series of attacks by an increasing number of birds

The Opening - The opening is very important to help emphasis the point in the rest of the film. At the beginning we see the birds caged and trapped by the humans. this goes with the narrative as at the beginning there are no obvious desires. as the film goes on the birds are the ones that are free, and trapping then humans (in houses, cars, phone boxes). this mirrors the desires of Melanie and Mitch who want a sexual relationship with each other. without the contrast of the opening the theme of desires being followed would not be as strong.

The Birds - The attacking birds represent the explosive outburst of maternal superego trying to prevent a sexual relationship between Mitch and Melanie. An indirect revelation of Lydia's character. She is a possessive mother, intent upon furthering a symbiotic, oedipal relationship with her son. whereas the birds themselves represent the id; the unconscious desires - in this case, not of one specific character.
The birds behaviour is very subjective and unpredictable, and this shows how the mind is unpredictable, and with all the desire suppressed by the superego can rear at any time, and attack the stability of the conscious mind.

Being Trapped/isolated - The theme of isolation runs through the film. both the main characters are isolated (Melanie - never seen with any family or friends, and when she visits Bodega bay, she has to make up that she is staying with a friend. Mitch - even though he has family and friends, they live in Bodega Bay, which is a small isolated town; and to further the families isolation they live out on some land that can only be accessed by a small dirt round or by boat.) The town itself is small and isolated, which causes the residents to become trapped when the birds attack. this image represents the isolation of the human mind and when the subconscious and desires of the id are followed the mind becomes trapped by the desires and under attack.

No Score - Throughout the whole of the film there is no non-diegetic music above the visuals, to provoke any emotions into the audience, like the rest of Hitchcock films do.
bird sound is natures music, so by not overwriting this with a score, it emphasises, not only the birds themselves, but the power of the birds, intern the power of the subconscious mind.
The subjective camera shots throughout the film build up the tension without the need for a score. an example of this is when lydia visits farmer to talk about the odd behaviour if the chicken and the broken china is seen in the shot.

The Oedipus Complex

Definition
Oedipus complex, in psychoanalytic theory, a desire for sexual involvement with the parent of the opposite sex and a concomitant sense of rivalry with the parent of the same sex; a crucial stage in the normal developmental process. The term derives from the Theban hero Oedipus of Greek legend, who unknowingly slew his father and married his mother; its female analogue, the Electra complex, is named for another mythological figure, who helped slay her mother.

The Oedipus Complex according to Freud
Oedipus complex denotes the emotions and ideas that the mind keeps in the unconscious, via dynamic repression, that concentrates upon a child's desire to sexually possess his/her mother, and kill his/her father. Sigmund Freud, who coined the term "Oedipus complex" believed that the Oedipus complex is a desire for the mother in both sexes (he believed that girls have a homosexual attraction towards their mother).

In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, child's identification with the same-sex parent is the successful resolution go the Oedipus complex and of the Electra complex; key psychological experiences that are necessary for the development of  a mature sexual role and identity. Sigmund Freud further proposed that boys and girls experience the complexes differently: boys in a form  of castration anxiety, girls in a form of penis envy; and that unsuccessful resolution of the complexes might lead to neurosis, paedophilia, and homosexuality. Men and women shot are fixated in the Oedipal and Electra stages of their psychosexual development might be considered "mother-fixated" and "father-fixated". In  adult life this can lead to a choice of a sexual partner who resembles one's parent.

In order to develop into a successful adult with a healthy identity, the child must identify with the sae-sex parent in oder to resolve the conflict. Freud suggested that while the primal id wants to eliminate the father, the more realistic ego knows that the father is much stronger.

According to Freud, the boy then experiences what he called castration anxiety - a fear of both literal and figurative emasculation. Freud believed that as the child becomes aware of the physical differences between males and females, he assumes that the female's penis has been removed and that his father will also castrate him as a punishment for desiring his mother.

In order to resolve the conflict, the boy then identifies with his father. it is at this point that the super-ego is formed. the super-ego becomes a sort of inner moral authority, and internalisation of the father figure that strives to suppress the urges of the id and the ego act upon these idealistic standards.

The Electra Complex
The Electra complex derives from the 5th-century BC Greek mythologic character Electra, who plotted matricidal revenge with Orestes, her brother, against Clytemnestra, their mother, and Aegisthus, their stepfather, for their murder of Agamemnon, their father.

Initially, Freud equally applied the Oedipus complex to the psychosexual development of boys and girls, but later modified the female aspects of the theory as "feminine Oedipus attitude" and "negative Oedipus complex" (Carl Jung in 1913, proposed the Electra complex to describe a girl's daughter-mother competition for psychosexual possession  of the father).

In the phallic stage, a girl's Electra complex is her decisive psychodynamic experience in forming a discrete sexual identity (ego). Whereas a boy develops castration anxiety, a girl develops penis envy rooted in anatomic fact: without  a penis, she cannot sexually possess mother, as the infantile id demands. Resultantly, the girl redirects her desire for sexual union upon father, thus progressing to heterosexual femininity, which culminates in bearing a child, who replaces the absent penis.

Freud thus considers a girl's negative Oedipus complex to be more emotionally intense that that of a boy, resulting, potentially, in a woman of submissive, insecure personality; thus might an unresolved Electra complex, daughter-mother competition for psychosexual possession of father, lead to a phallic-stage fixation conducive to a girl becoming a woman who continually strives to dominate men, either as an unusually seductive woman (high self-esteem) or as an unusually submissive woman (low self-esteem).

The Oedipus Complex according to Lacan

The Oedipus complex is, for Lacan, the paradigmatic triangular structure, which constrasts with all dua; relations. The key function in the Oedipus complex is thus that of the father, the third term which transforms the dual relation between mother and child into a triadic structure. The Oedipus complex is thus nothing less than the passage from the imaginary order to the symbolic order, ‘the conquest of the symbolic relation as such’. The fact that the passage to the symbolic passes via a complex sexual dialectic means that the subject cannot have access to the symbolic order without confronting the problem of the sexual difference.

Lacan analyses this passage from the imaginary to the symbolic by identifying three ‘times’ of the Oedipus complex, the sequence being one of logical rather than chronological priority.

The first time of the Oedipus complex is characterized by the imaginary triangle of mother, child and phallus. Lacan calls this the pre-oedipal triangle. Prior to the invention of the father there is never a purely dual relation between the mother and the child but always a third term, the phallus, an imaginary object which the mother desires beyond the child himself.

In the first time of the Oedipus complex, then, the child realizes that both he and the mother are marked by a lack. The mother is marked by lack, since she is seen to be incomplete; otherwise she would not desire. The subject is also marked by a lack, since he does not completely satisfy the mother’s desire. The lacking element I both cases is the imaginary phallus. The mother desires the phallus she lacks, and the subject seeks to become the object of her desire; he seeks to be the phallus for the mother and fill out her lack. At this point, the mother is omnipotent and her desire is the law. Although this omnipotent may be seen as threatening from the very beginning, the sense of threat is intensified when the child’s own sexual drives begin to manifest themselves. This emergence of the real of the drive introduces a discordant mote of anxiety onto the previously seductive imaginary triangle. The child is now confronted with the realization that he cannot simply fool the mother’s desire with the imaginary semblance of a phallus – he must present something in the real. Yet the child’s real organ is hopelessly inadequate. This sense of inadequacy and impotence in the face of an omnipotent maternal desire that cannot be placated gives rise to anxiety. Only the intervention of the father in the subsequent times of the Oedipus complex can provide a real solution to this anxiety.

The second ‘time’ of the Oedipus complex is characterized by the intervention of the imaginary father. The father imposes the law on the mother’s desire by denying her access to the phallic object and forbidding the subject access to the mother. Lacan often refers to this intervention as the ‘castration’ of the mother, even though he states that, properly speaking, the operation is not one of castration but of privation. This intervention is mediated by the discourse of the mother; in other words, what is important is not that the real father step in and impose the law, but that this law be respected by the mother herself in both her words and her actions. The subject now sees the father as a rival for the mother’s desire.

The third ‘time’ of the Oedipus complex is marked by the intervention of the real father. By showing that he has the phallus, and neither exchanges nor gives it, the real father castrates the child, n the sense of making it impossible for the child to persist in trying to be the phallus for the mother; it is no use competing with the real father, because he always wins. The subject is freed from the impossible and anxiety-provoking task of having to be the phallus by realizing that the father has it. This allows the subject to identify with the father. In this secondary (symbolic) identification the subject transcends the aggressively inherent in primary (imaginary) Oedipal identification with the father.  

Since the symbolic is the realm of the law, and since the Oedipus complex is the conquest of the symbolic order, it has a normative and normalizing function: ‘ the Oedipus complex is essential for the human being to be able to accede to a humanized structure of the real’. This normative function is to be understood in reference to both clinical structures and the question of sexuality.

In perversion, the complex is carried through to the third time, but instead of identifying with the father, the subject identifies with the mother and/or the imaginary phallus, ths harking back to the imaginary pre-oedipal triangle. A probia arises when  they cannot make the transition from the second time of the Oedipus complex to the third time because the real father does not iintervene; the phobia then functions aas a substitute for the intervention of the real father, thus permitting the subject to make the passage to the third time of the Oedipus complex (though often in an atypical way).

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.