Tuesday 30 December 2014

Contextual Studies Notes 13/11/2014


Contextual Studies Lecture / Psychoanalysis


  • Psychoanalysis can be interpreted as a ‘talking therapy’, revealing deeper meanings or hidden motivations within our behaviour.
  • Psychoanalysis can be used as a tool, which the arts can be analysed.
  • The arts express the patterns and problems of the psyche. We can understand the psyche and even society through (psycho) analysing the arts. 


Sigmund Freud – 1856 – 1939

  • Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who created an entirely new approach to the understanding of the human personality. He is regarded as one of the most influential - and controversial - minds of the 20th century
A man with his head in the sand – This image is used to denote the term of ‘The Unconscious’.
  • The Unconscious can be seen as our buried thoughts. /

  • Traumatic experience, Repression. The return of the repressed – pathogenic patterns.
  • Sublimation – is the transformation of unwanted impulses into something less harmful. This can simply be a distracting release or may be a constructive and valuable piece of work. When we are faced with the dissonance of uncomfortable thoughts, we create psychic energy.


  •  Spellbound directed by A. Hitchcock. Describing how our dreams are a safe outlet for trauma / instinct. They can provide access to the ‘Unconscious’. Full of symbolic narrative.
  • The arts are also a symbolic narrative.The Production of Fantasy – Robert C Allen – Channels of disclosure, Reassembled – “When we watch a film it is as if we were somehow dreaming”.
  • “The cinema situation reproduces the hallucinatiory power of a dream – it turns perception into something that looks like a hallucination”.
  • "Psychoanalysis, as a theory of human psychology, decribes the ways in which the small human being comes to develop a specific personality and sexual identity within the larger network of social relations called culture. It takes as its object the mechanisms of the unconscious---- resistance, repression, sexuality, and the Oedipus complex--- and seeks to analyze the fundamental structures of desire that underlie all human activity."
  • Regression – Within animation we area confronted with a visual language that is free to explore our child like experiences. This is animation for adults as well as children. We regress to our childhood experiences.
  • Clip: The Simpsons – Shock Therapy.
  • In this clip of the Simpsons, the act is less shocking due to it being an animation, if this act was to be carried out in another medium, such as film it would be horrific to watch.


  • Schadenfreude is pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. This word is taken from German and literally means 'harm-joy.' It is the feeling of joy or pleasure when one sees another fail or suffer misfortune. 
  • According to this model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends;

  • The super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and

  • The ego is the organised, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego. The super-ego can stop one from doing certain things that one's id may want to do.
  • Eg. The Father – the Judge – law
  • The Mother – the Jury – morality
  • The Child – the deviant – amorality


  • The Oedipus Complex: The Oedipal complex is a term used by Sigmund Freud in his theory of psychosexual stages of development to describe a boy's feelings of desire for his mother and jealously and anger towards his father. Essentially, a boy feels like he is in competition with his father for possession of his mother. He views his father as a rival for her attentions and affections.
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