Sadder, Darker and Alive: Self, Suffering and Psychoanalysis in Cinema

Abstract

This thesis is an analytical film studies project which aims to examine the human experience of psychological disorder and psychological suffering. Using key cinematic texts, the research investigates a group of Western feature films which each contain a central character experiencing psychological disorder. Functioning as a culturally reflexive medium, these films are representative of some of the more common psychological disorders in contemporary times. Clinical psychology’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Five is first used to organize and diagnose each character, but the textual analysis of these films is largely psychoanalytically informed. This project combines modern clinical psychologically and psychoanalysis so that a more comprehensive picture of the experience of psychological disorder and suffering may emerge. By taking into consideration that origin, mechanism, affect and symptomatology are part of an interconnected group, this project explores psychological disorder as a human phenomenon. More specifically, this research refutes the notion that psychological disorder and psychological health exist in a binary, instead recognizing that psychological status is a spectrum with many possible variations. Philosophical theory by Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek and Julia Kristeva is used to explore these film characters and their respective disorders from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Lacan’s theories on the infantile mirror phase, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, Žižek’s theories on the Real, the big Other and the Event, and Kristeva’s theories on abjection and melancholia are integral to the interpretation of these six films – tracking the origin, mechanism and manifestation of the psychological disorder through the narrative trajectory of each film analysed. The research confirms links between psychosis and a reliance on the image of the self; between unresolved guilt and psychological deterioration; between trauma and changes to identity; between emotional detachment and moral transgression; between physical space and subjectivity; between meaninglessness and language. As a group of films, the analysis also revealed that psychological suffering is intricately connected to the body, a sense of time and a sense of death.