APPENDIX. The Neurological Basis of Psychoanalytic Film Theory: Metz's Emotional Debt to Freud the Biologist

Abstract

We are not used to feeling strong emotions without their having any ideational content, and therefore, if the content is missing, we seize as a substitute upon some other content which is in some way or other suitable, much as our police, when they cannot catch the right murderer, arrest a wrong one instead. – Sigmund Freud Psychoanalytic film theory has become the dominant theoretical approach for investigating the pleasures of the cinema, and yet there is some question even among psychoanalytic critics whether this body of theory has given us much insight into filmic emotions per se. Can psychoanalytic theory indeed provide a useful way to understand the specific emotions that film texts elicit? After surveying landmark psychoanalytic writings on film, this appendix examines the foundations of those writings in the Freudian-Lacanian assumptions about emotion. Looking at Freud's central conceptions concerning emotion can tell us whether psychoanalysis can provide a strong theoretical anchor for discussions of filmic emotion. In psychoanalytic film criticism's discussion, there is a conspicuous absence of the word “emotion” in favor of the terms “pleasure” and “desire.” Distinctions among pleasure, desire, and emotion are not purely terminological; the choice of pleasure and desire over emotion is symptomatic (to use a Freudian term) of a larger theoretical neglect of the emotions. By discussing “desire” and “pleasure,” psychoanalytic film theory can appear to be dealing with questions of emotion while it continues academia's traditional neglect of the emotions as too “messy.”