Narcissistic Identification Research Articles

As canções em Arábia: Ouvindo o próprio coração

The communication intends to discuss the use of songs in the film: Arabia (2017) by Affonso Uchôa and João Dumans, their potential as a narrative element and in the evocations of a certain nostalgia, to a certain Brazilian cinematography that thought about the world of work and placed as protagonist the oppressed.In the film, the character Cristiano (Aristides de Souza) presents himself as an unlikely Benjaminian narrator. Their experiences/memories, their affective bonds, conditioned to a permanent displacement by the imposition of the need of the world of work and escapes. The songs in the film’s fabulation, with its musical discourse and its verbal poetics, trace a path closely linked with the nostalgia and orality of the narrator Cristiano. They carry an affective appropriation but extrapolate the “narcissistic identification” or the “oceanic feeling”, utopianly making present the idealization of a nostalgic representation of the worker and his collective experience.In the silent cry of its storyteller and the troubadours on guitar circles, the film seeks community life, subjective identity, a common word. Listening to their hearts, the old horses will wake up one day and let the factory burn.

The Pipe Child and the Cork Child: Infantile Vulnerability and Malignant Symbiosis

The author, based on his experience of intensive psychoanalysis with children suffering from early developmental catastrophes, examines narcissistic intrusive identifications and their related unconscious phantasies, anxieties and defenses. The paper describes two central unconscious phantasies: that of Pipe Children, who experience themselves as open-ended, hollow pipes, helplessly subjected to infiltrations and invasions by the object’s psychic toxic material; and Cork Children, who feel compelled to stuff and block what they perceive as the object’s holes or internal voids, in order to keep the container functioning and themselves alive. Some varieties of internal scripts within the child are described, particularly those of children experiencing either the impenetrable object’s invasive projections of psychic materials, or a more primitive osmotic/diffuse identification, in which there is no clear differentiation or localization between leaking-in and spilling-out psychic materials in self and object.

The Truth of the Work of Art: Freud and Benjamin on Goethe

Juliet Mitchell’s psychoanalytic account of sibling rivalry, fluctuating between narcissistic identification (love) and fear of annihilation (hate), also applies to Walter Benjamin’s model of true love in his reading of Goethe’s Elective Affinities. This model is found in the utopian novella “The Curious Tale of the Childhood Sweethearts,” inserted within Goethe’s novel. By reducing the relationship between the novella and its framing narrative to an opposition between truth and semblance, Benjamin replicates in his reading the specular logic that is love’s obstacle. On the other hand, Freud’s analysis of an episode in Goethe’s autobiography can be said to retroactively operate what Mitchell calls “lateral castration,” for Freud compares the great writer to patients in analysis and thus establishes the necessary seriality that creates “space for one who is the same and different.” Still, and although elements of his own autobiography facilitate the construction of alternative scenarios, Freud exempts Goethe’s sisters from the position of rivals. Recognising “the sister” as earliest playmate, and object of hatred and narcissistic identification, like Mitchell does, might be the first step necessary for drawing a model of love for women as peers this side of utopia.

Transactional Analysis and Psychoanalysis: Overcoming the Narcissism of Small Differences in the Shadow of Eric Berne

This article addresses how narcissistic identification with specific theoretical models interferes with further learning, development, and maturation within both individual and group contexts. Drawing on Freud’s initial reflections on the functions and consequences of narcissistic identifications and defenses within the life of groups, the author describes the impact of the narcissistically motivated inflation of differences in the history and evolution of transactional analysis. While acknowledging Eric Berne’s efforts to create an open and inclusive model of psychotherapy, the transgenerational consequences of his ambivalent and conflicted relationship with psychoanalysis are portrayed. The narcissistic encapsulation of transactional analysis as a unique methodology, subsequent to Berne’s death, is challenged.

Venus and the (R)uses of Power: Nelisiwe Xaba’sThey Look at Me and That’s All They Think

A number of contemporary art/performance pieces invoke “the Venus Hottentot.” Nelisiwe Xaba’s They Look at Me and That’s All They Think demonstrates how the contemporary reproduction of “the Venus” requires the Black performer to labor for white narcissistic identification and psychic rehabilitation. By focusing on Black transnational labor and mobility, They Look at Me highlights how anti-Black domination is simultaneously resisted and reinforced through performance.

The Relation Between Narcissistic Personality Traits and Accurate Identification of, and Preference for, Facially Communicated Narcissism

When evaluating someone as a potential social acquaintance, people prefer affiliative, pleasant individuals. This necessitates the evolution of perceptual acuity in distinguishing between genuinely prosocial traits and those connoting exploitative intentions. Such intentions can be readily inferred through facial structures connoting personality, even in the absence of other diagnostic cues. We sought to explore how self-reported narcissism, a personality constellation associated with inflated self-views and exploitative intentions, might facilitate one’s ability to detect narcissism in others’ faces as means of identifying social targets who could best satisfy potential exploitative goals. Participants viewed pairs of male and female targets manipulated to connote high and low levels of narcissism before identifying which appeared more narcissistic and indicating their preference among each pair. Narcissistic individuals were no better at accurately identifying other narcissists, but such individuals demonstrated considerable aversion to narcissistic faces. Women higher in exploitative narcissism additionally preferred narcissistic female faces, while men high in exploitative narcissism demonstrated similar patterns of aversion toward narcissistic male faces. Findings provide evidence that narcissistic individuals may adaptively avoid those whom they identify as having similar exploitative behavior repertoire, though when considering the exploitive dimension of narcissism specifically, sex differences emerged.

Chairman of the Board Incarcerated for White-Collar Crime after Bankruptcy: What Does His Autobiography Tell Us about Convenience?

ABSTRACT Some members of the upper echelon in society violate laws whenever they feel necessary. They have access to resources to commit and conceal financial crime while they deny the guilty mind. Autobiographies by convicted white-collar offenders are an interesting source of information to understand motives, opportunities, and willingness for deviant behaviors. This research applies the theory of convenience to study the autobiography of a convicted chairman of the board in Norway. While claiming corporate crime for the benefit of the business, he actually carried out occupational crime to benefit himself. As an entrepreneur, he felt entitled to do whatever he considered necessary. He suffered from narcissistic identification, where there is little difference between personal money and company money.

In conversation: Freud, Abraham and Ferenczi on “Mourning and Melancholia” (1915–1918)

ABSTRACTThis article concentrates on Freud’s draft of “Mourning and Melancholia,” written in 1915 and published in 1996. After presenting a summary of the main theses of Freud’s draft, Abraham’s and Ferenczi’s reactions to the text are discussed as well as Freud’s response to their comments. In addition to reviewing Freud’s partial adoption of Ferenczi’s introjection and his reluctance towards Abraham’s “mouth eroticism and sadism,” the article considers the question of whether and to what extent his disciples’ interjections—particularly Abraham’s approach—made their way into the final version of “Mourning and Melancholia.” The article closes by integrating the notion of narcissistic identification, which forms the core of Freud’s understanding of depression, and his study of the “preliminary stages of love,” written the same year, into a conceptualization of the narcissistic relationship between subject and object. Special attention is paid to the clinical relevance of the difference between narcissistic and libidinal object cathexis, which Freud had introduced.

The Anxiety and Melancholia in Ted Hughes’s Poems

This paper examines Ted Hughes’s poetry in terms of anxiety and melancholia; how he depicts his unconscious agony and how he overcomes the symptoms of depression which were caused by the suicide of both Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill. This paper will argue that Hughes’s anxiety is about castration, a kind of psychological trauma that repeats like an incantation in the crow’s words. Moreover, the effect of depression and fear, rather than the mood of mourning in his poetry, is mediated through the voice of the black crow. To elaborate, its cynical tone can be seen as originating from Hughes’s depression and feelings and self-reproach. Through his regressive attitude to avoid trauma, I can find his symptom immersed in the narcissistic impulse. Even though the narcissistic identification is an illusion of the imaginary, his narcissistic attitude is defending the suicidal drive by leaning on the fantasy that he is the ideal ego of the imaginary. Like a fetus in the uterus, he indulges in absolute stability and warmth, but Oedipus’s mother is also brutally murdered in his poems. The cruel imagination of murdering the mother can be a delusional nature of self-punishment. But by expressing these psychological pressures and tensions in a poetic language, Hughes could have endured the depths of depression. The fantasy represented in his poems can function as a barrier to the collapse of his identity.

The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889-1930 by Sarah Parker

Reviewed by: The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889-1930 by Sarah Parker Pearl Chaozon Bauer THE LESBIAN MUSE AND POETIC IDENTITY, 1889-1930, by Sarah Parker. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013, 219 pp. $150.00 cloth; $52.95 paper. In many ways, The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889-1930 turns to critical work on performativity within fin-de-siècle decadence, modernism, and “male”/“female” literary traditions to address the difficulty with which women poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries claimed poetic identity in a masculinized Western literary tradition. Sarah Parker posits that certain women poets turned to what she broadly terms homoerotically inclined or “queer” muse/poet relationships to transform the static poet/muse relationship into one based on fluidity and mobility. Her book focuses primarily on how women poets Katharine Bradley, Edith Cooper, Olive Custance, Amy Lowell, H. D., and Bryher reimagined the muse in three ways. First, they employed a contemporary living muse who was able to assert her or his own subject position. Second, they emphasized the flexibility of this position by shifting the gender of this muse from female to male. Third, they opened up the poet/muse dyad to include a third entity, thereby questioning fixed notions of gender and identity. Parker’s study, thus, stems from a new feminist understanding of the muse founded upon Adrienne Rich’s essay on her own poetic development, [End Page 281] “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971), and Ruth Vanita’s Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (1996), which reconsiders the muse as both genders. What distinguishes Parker’s book from other scholarly work is the way she analyzes the influences of fin-de-siècle poetics and its enabling constructions of gender, sexuality, and poetic identity on the next generation of poets. She also reimagines the concept of the muse along more disruptive lines, one that crosses the boundaries of gender, sexuality, and time. While the muse has always been a figure of inspiration, Parker’s new reading turns the muse into a figure of collaboration. Because the muse is a focal figure of the lyric tradition, her project also rethinks the lyric tradition as a dynamic poetic dialogue where the muse becomes an active participant in lyric production. Parker insists upon the need to look beyond historical or mythological muse figures because a relationship with a living muse is an ever-evolving dialogue that is constantly in process. Indeed, Parker outlines how these shifting relationships help women poets claim identity by highlighting the changing (gendered) power roles of a fluid poet/muse-muse/poet relationship; she repeatedly turns to the image of a flexible triangulation when describing this mobility, arguing that expanding the dyad to include a third term “disrupts the narcissistic identification associated with two ‘likes’ looking at each other, engendering the possibility of difference and desire” (p. 168). In the fifth chapter on H. D. and Bryher, for example, Parker describes how the two first collaborated on translating ancient Greek images and then later used photographic and cinematic images to share and swap roles as subject/object. For the poets, the image is the third term that helps them negotiate their erotically collaborative dynamic. There are two points that Parker might reconsider. First, the figure of Sappho is not frozen in the past. She is as complex, multiple, and ever-shifting as the contemporary muses that Parker describes because Sappho transgresses time and gender as a figure of the imagination. Second, since these writers collaborated not only with living muses in the present but also with mythical or historical muse archetypes from the past, the triangulation that Parker describes can be expanded to include not only a third party but also a fourth or sometimes even a fifth figure (resembling what Elaine Marks has termed “lesbian intertextuality”1). In Long Ago (1889), for example, Bradley and Cooper utilize the Sapphic muse as both inspiration and a third term, one which speaks alongside their voices. However, Bradley and Cooper’s contemporary muses were also each other—as Michael Field, they shared and swapped the roles of poet and muse...

Mães que Perderam Filhos: uma Leitura Psicanalítica do Filme Rabbit Hole

Para compreender e tratar dos casos de mães que perdem filhos - consensuada enquanto a dor sem nome, sem fim e sem tamanho -, emerge a necessidade de retomar conceitos fundamentais desde o princípio da obra freudiana. O objetivo do trabalho foi lançar luz aos conceitos de luto e melancolia para compreender o sofrimento da mãe diante da perda do filho. O método utilizado foi a análise do filme Rabbit Hole, que retrata a história de um casal que perde um filho. Para enriquecer o trabalho, foram utilizadas vinhetas de entrevistas que realizamos com mães que perderam filhos. Os resultados revelaram o conceito de identificação narcísica enquanto fundamental para compreender a questão posta. Existe a hipótese de que no filme a identificação tenha sido estabelecida com o agressor, o que impossibilita o trabalho de luto. Como conclusão, pontuamos que a perda do filho abre uma grande ferida narcísica que afunda as mães em estados melancólicos. A psicanálise pode conceder um lugar de sofrimento para a mãe que perde o filho sem, contudo, deixar que ela recaia completamente no lugar de vítima, visando que se faça um "giro" da morte em direção à vida.

The Mixed Bag of Narcissistic Organizational Identification at the Top of the Organization

Some CEOs appear to have strong organizational identification and yet exhibit behaviors that exploit the organization for personal benefit. These are not behaviors that theory typically associates ...

“No-one took me, no-one left me”

To elucidate the difficulty of some analysands in representing the analyst as the “other” or face the analyst as a separate object, the author makes use of Strindberg's drama “The Pelican.” This play portrays how a destructive internal maternal relationship obstructs creativity. An insufficiently containing object prevents the creation of a third position and the bringing together of the subjective world and a shared reality. Under such conditions, independent thinking and separateness cannot be tolerated. Clinical material illustrates a young woman's difficulty to relate to the analyst as a separate object by clinging to the misconception about the analyst's inaccessibility; the analysand is absorbed by a struggle to uphold her own wishes in the presence of the desires of the object. The discussion focuses on how narcissistic identifications can be established as a protection against the challenge of facing the other in the object.

Mocking the Mothers of the Novel: Mary Wollstonecraft, Maternal Metaphor, and the Reproduction of Sympathy

When Mary Wollstonecraft began her work as a critic for Analytical Review in 1788, literary reviewers were still groping towards criteria of novel-writing (Tompkins 18). Their difficulties, argues J. M. S. Tompkins in The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800, stemmed from the vagueness of object for which they were to legislate, and by uncertainty ... as to how fiction could be reviewed (18). Explicitly noting critic's challenge in her first published review, Wollstonecraft observes of The Happy Recovery: a Sentimental Novel by a Lady that analysis of novels will seldom be expected, nor can of be tried by criterion of reason (Works 7: 19). Her demurral suggests another perceived obstacle for reviewers--the overwrought, sentimental language of majority of novels they encountered, and its association with women writers and readers. She summarily dismisses The Happy Recovery as of folly, affectation, and improbability, (7: 19) alluding in review's first line to novel's formlessness. While typical epistolary structure could conceivably undermine formal unity Wollstonecraft desires, heterogeneous mass she identifies has more to with unrestrained expression and fabulation reviewers expected of most women's fiction. Her only other specific comments about The Happy Recovery read as follows: Metaphors and vulgarisms abound. The countess, 'wrapt up in sable and all-encircling mantle of despair, is seized with a violent puking of blood' (7: 19). Like many of her peers, Wollstonecraft relies here, and elsewhere in her reviews, on direct quotation to give her readership a sense of prose style; she then moves quickly to a series of suggestive generalizations about emergent genre and its probable effects on uninformed, unformed female readers. Young women may be termed romantic, she writes, when they boast of being tremblingly alive all o'er, and faint and sigh as novelist informs them they (7: 19). More a quivering sensate than a being, female reader constructed by Wollstonecraft is said to act under direction of artificial (7: 19) transmitted through sentimental novel. The imagination of affected reader hunt[s] after shadows and is suffered to stray ... where no vestige of nature appears because it has been trained to respond only to false sentiment and vague fabricated feelings [that] supply place of (7: 19). It seeks no moderate enjoyments or duties and avoids rational books offering a semblance of reality and order, as they do not throw mind into an exquisite tumult (7: 19). The developing mind is thus a mirror of what it reads: romantic imagination strays and errs like plots of traditional romance; shapeless sentimental novel begets a similarly disordered consciousness. As a former governess, proprietor of a girls' school, and a writer of conduct books, Wollstonecraft clearly has ideas about impact of novel-writing, and if she cannot try The Happy Recovery by any criterion of reason, she is nonetheless anxious to defend its potentially corruptible, would-be readers. She argues: [R]idicule should direct its shafts against this fair game, and, if possible, deter from imbibing wildest notions, most pernicious prejudices; prejudices which influence conduct, and spread insipidity over social converse. (7: 19) Strong action is needed to protect thoughtless readers absorbed by cant of sensibility because they lack independence of mind supported by clear principles and a well-developed reasoning capacity. Unpracticed in self-control or containment, they cannot help but infect others with insipid discourse they have unconsciously imbibed. This impulse toward imitation is manifested variably and uncontrollably: through use of lofty, artificial language in everyday conversation; through narcissistic identification with hyper-sensitive heroines; and through adoption of false sentiments that threaten their sexual purity. …

The deconstruction of primary narcissism

The author examines Winnicott ’s contribution to Freud ’s concept of primary narcissism. In Mourning and melancholia, Freud laid the foundations for this contribution, but it was Winnicott who turned it into a clinically useful concept. There are three of Winnicott’s ideas that can be seen as preliminary stages to his theory of transitional phenomena and illusion. They serve as an introduction to thinking about the analysis of the analysand ’s primary narcissism and the theoretical prerequisites that make the interpretation of primary narcissism possible. Through the exploration of three main points in Winnicott’s writings the author shows how Winnicott’s conceptualizations are both new and a continuation of Freud ’s thinking. His ideas are thus part of the overall theoretical pattern of Freud ’s metapsychology. The three main points are as follows:1. In bringing maternal care and the presence of the psychic environment into the construction of primary narcissism, Winnicott made it possible to analyse narcissism. His ideas enable us to stand back from the characteristic solipsism of narcissism, which holds that everything comes from the self and only from the self. The latter concept tends to eliminate the role of the object and environment in the construction of the self. At the same time, by deconstructing the way in which the self is infiltrated by a certain number of narcissistic postulates, Winnicott made it possible to interpret the theory of narcissism itself.2. Between the individual and the sense of self, Winnicott inserted the maternal object and her function as a mirror of affects who acts as a medium for the organization of self‐identity. Primary identity is established through the construction and elimination of a narcissistic identification that becomes meaningful in the context of a primary homosexual relationship functioning as a ‘double’.3. A process of differentiation that governs the discovery of the object is in a dialectical relationship with narcissistic identification. That process can be understood only in terms of the responses made by the primary psychic environment to the baby’s primary aggression.

"Families make the best enemies": Paradoxes of Narcissistic Identification in Toni Morrison's Love

There are many significant features in the underappreciated Love (2003), Toni Morrison's eighth novel. (1) A feature that both connects it to, and distinguishes it from, each of her previous novels (a ninth, A Mercy, was published in November 2008) is its particular expression of the phenomenon of identification. Conceptually, seems relatively uncomplicated in its basic Freudian premise. As one technical dictionary puts it, it is the psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides. first such other, model, or object, is the mother, and in typical development, new ones will follow. Thus, [i]t is by means of a series of identifications that the personality is constituted and specified (Laplanche and Pontalis 205). But in clinical theory and practice, as well as in the literary criticism they foster, is a complex and essentially contested concept generating competing viewpoints. Representing [main] lines of descent, the two come primarily, as Jean Wyatt suggests in Risking Difference, Freud's two major paradigms of identification (9). paradigms are descended from the dual myths, the Oedipus and the Narcissus, that in The Neurotic's Individual Myth Jacques Lacan posits as the basic ones operating in the construction and functioning of subjectivity. It is here where a reading of Toni Morrison's novel through the theoretical lens of the sometimes controversial Slavoj Zizek becomes pivotal in understanding the intricacies of the concept of identification. For in Love, in the relation between two young girls who grow into a conflictual adulthood and who, despite age and social change and change of fortune and outbreaks of destructive violence, never outgrow their attachment to each other, Morrison constructs not the more common oedipal but what must be regarded as a narcissistic whose paradoxical expressions readily, if complexly, avail themselves to analysis through Zizek's mediation of Freudian and Lacanian ideas. Thus, I shall turn predominantly though not exclusively to Zikek, a prolific social, political, and psychoanalytic theorist whose integration of Freud and Lacan has been so influential. (2) While there surely are other essays on the richly rewarding Love one could write on oedipalization, and fathers, I eventually shall focus upon narcissistic identification, with its emphasis on maternal relations. First, however, because of the reservations many African Americanists harbor regarding psychoanalytic theory vis-a-vis African American identity, culture, or cultural expressions (including literature), there are two major issues to which I must attend that complicate the stakes in any application of psychoanalysis, whether Freudian or otherwise, to the development of black subjectivity in America. more general one is whether tradition--meaning Freudian or neo-Freudian--psychoanalysis even applies. (3) Among scholars and critics addressing African American literature, reservations are such that in her Psychoanalysis and Black Novels Claudia Tate suggests that many feel there is something illicit in using the approach. To do so constitutes, Tate wittily notes, a sort of 'roll in the hay' with Freud and company (5). Of such applications, the main critiques are cultural and historical. That is, given that Freud extrapolated his theory of the unconscious and its relation to constitution and functioning of subjectivity at a particular historical moment (the late nineteenth and early twentieth century), within a specific (western European) culture, and amid the ideological domination of the patriarchal nuclear family, we may reasonably ask whether oedipal determinations of gender and identity can be assumed as universal or if not universal can be--even with modification--made applicable to subjects from cultural or racial backgrounds different from that of the discipline's founder. …

The Bright Forms Shining in the Dark: Juliet Mitchell's Theory of Sibling Dynamics as Illuminated in A. S. Byatt's “The Chinese Lobster”

Through a reading of A. S. Byatt's “The Chinese Lobster,” this paper illustrates some implications of Juliet Mitchell's theory of the role of siblings in mental life. Mitchell's recent work elucidates a complex web of fantasies, desires, and conflicts centered on sibling-figures. The paper begins by outlining several of Mitchell's concepts: the sibling crisis; lateral fantasy; laterally based narcissistic identifications; and the role of lateral relatedness in object love, self-esteem, thirdness, and hysteria. Byatt's story provides a springboard for exploring the profound relational significance of these ideas.

MODES OF IDENTIFICATION: FREUD'S CONCEPTS REORGANIZED

The author examines Freud's conceptualizations of identification, Melanie Klein's projective identification, and Anna Freud's identification with the aggressor and altruistic surrender of one's own instinctual impulses. After demonstrating that Freud's concept primary identification refers not to a process but to the state of being identified, he suggests the substitution of it with Sandler's term “oneness”. He notes that hysterical identification, narcissistic identification, and introjection are unconscious processes that lead to a state of oneness and that they can be distinguished clinically in terms of the emotional meaning that an object holds for the individual. Furthermore, it is shown that the concept of identification with the aggressor represents a defense mechanism of its own and a specific mode of narcissistic identification, which together with projections and hysterical re-identification play a decisive rôle in projective identification and altruistic surrender of one's own instinctual impulses.

Lecture psychanalytique du concept d’apsychognosie défini par Fouquet

In medical study of alcoholism, the present keen interest in mnemic disorders observed in patients doesn’t seem to come down to a mere observation of a deficiency caused by a chronic intoxication. In fact, more than 40 years before, Fouquet had already done this same observation of mnemic deterioration insisting on the reversible nature of these disorders in the short run. He even went as far as describing this phenomenon with the introduction of a neologism: “apsychognosie”. After summarizing Fouquet's description of “apsychognosie” from self-consciousness disorders, the emergence of archaic psychic agencies, the use of preserved professional activity schemata and a transitory state perfectly reversible, we will suggest a psychoanalytical reading of this neologism. To explain the presence of mnemic disorders we will review the links assumed by some successors of Fouquet between the theoretical approach of the psychosomatic school (Marty) and the neologism “apsychognosie”. Then, we will discuss the clinical description interest and the closeness between “apsychognosie” and “alexithymie” [Psychother Psychosom 26 (1975) 65–70] and [McDougall J. Plaidoyer pour une certaine anormalité. Paris: Gallimard; 1978]. Finally, we will suggest a theoretical approach inspired by Freud's and Lacan's theories of “apsychognosie”. From an etiopathologic hypothesis, the mnemic disorders present in alcoholic subjects are considered as an archaic encystment in an ideal of narcissistic identification having consequences on difficulties to live in connection with an appeal to a soothing paternal naming which is failing here.

Authorial Voice and Agency in Film Making

The aspiring film-maker is in a highly competitive environment where it is very easy to be seduced by narcissistic identification with the rewards of the media industries and become devastated by the failure to develop the skills and competencies which enable a ‘speakability’ within this environment. It is precisely through an understanding of authorship as the psychoanalytic performance of discourse that we can liberate students from the tyranny of the demand to be original and bring them into the expression of the experiential. Film-students as filmmakers need an understanding of their own psychic investments and those of their collaborators so that they can liberate each other from traumatic artistic silence and enable each other to find the unique artistic signifiers that articulate their desires. I look at Lacanian discourse theory to understand how we as educators may help them to achieve this.