Fictive Psyches: The Psychological Melodrama in 40s Films

Abstract

Despite the increasing importance of a deconstructive approach for film analysis, the fictive psyches of screen characters still lure film analysts to apply psychoanalysis to them as if they were patients. The characters are, after all, endowed with a psyche, with a past, with disorders (by the narrative); the duration of the film parallels the psychoanalytic session in which the patient speaks while the analyst listens and observes. In the light of his or her study, the analyst writes the case history replete with oedipal crises, fetishes or hysteria. If there is more than one film, the sessions can be multiplied to assume a greater resemblance to a real analysis. If the character changes identities slightly from film to film within the body of filmic fictions under analysis, as in the case of Hitchcock's heroes or the evil women of film noir, so much the better, for the analyst can deftly disrobe all disguises in favor of a core identity. Further, this analysis of the fictive psyche as real patient can be closely linked to traditional methods of film criticism and history such as auteurist criticism, speculation on audience identification or historical readings of national identities or cultural mythologies. One might think that structuralism would interfere, break the decoy, by presenting characters in fiction as constructions of the semic codes. From a structuralist perspective, the fictive psyches appear as bejeweled nightingales whose spring-wound mechanisms are soon