Frames of Mind

Luke Hockley

Description

The eminent psychologist Carl Jung is best known for such indelible contributions to modern thought as the concept of the collective unconscious, but his wide-spread work can also be fruitfully employed to analyze popular culture. Frames of Mind offers an introduction to the world of Post-Jungian film and television studies, examining how Jung’s theories can heighten our understanding of everything from Chinatown and Star Trek to advertisements.

 

In this illuminating psychoanalysis of our media environment, Luke Hockley probes questions such as why we have genuine emotional responses to film events we know to be fictional, why we are compulsively driven to watch television, and how advertisers use unconscious motifs to persuade viewers.

 

 

 

Sujets

• Popular Culture
• Película fotográfica
• General officer
• Television
• General
• Cultural Studies
• Radio
• Film
• Cinéma
• Cinema

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841509952
• Langue: English

Extrait

Frames of Mind: A Post-Jungian Look at Film, Television and Technology
Luke Hockley
For Mary, my wife
Frames of Mind: A Post-Jungian Look at Film, Television and Technology
Luke Hockley
A shorter version of Chapter 1 was previously published as Cinema as Illusion and Reality, Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture. Vol 73: 2005. ISBN 1-882670-30-2. Chapter 2 was previously published by Harvest: Journal for Jungian Studies. Vol 50: No. 2, 2004. ISSN 0266-4771.
First Published in the UK in 2007 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First published in the USA in 2007 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2007 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Typesetting: Mac Style, Nafferton, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-171-0/EISBN 978-184150-995-2
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
C ONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction Analytical Psychology - An Overview
Chapter 1 Cinema as Illusion and Reality
Chapter 2 Watching Films: The Affective Power of Cinema
Chapter 3 Chinatown : Investigating Affect
Chapter 4 A Jungian Approach to Television
Chapter 5 Narcissism and the Alchemy of Advertising
Chapter 6 Star Trek : Some Jungian Thoughts
Chapter 7 Technology as Modern Myth and Magic
Chapter 8 Identity and the Internet
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Of course, there are too many people to thank for their help and assistance with this project. However, institutionally, it is important to acknowledge the support of the University of Sunderland and, in particular, The Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies . The International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS) has offered a productive testing ground for many of the ideas in this book. I wish to thank personally Chris Hauke, for his patience, kind observations and friendship. Our work together on Chinatown is contained in Chapter Three. A thank you is owed to the trainees at the C. G. Jung Institute in Z rich who showed me just how divergent and personal the meanings of films can be. Manuel Alvarado must not be forgotten. His unique combination of charm, patience, panic and perseverance has been instrumental in bringing this book into being. To Andrew Samuels and the team at the University of Essex, a big thank you!
I NTRODUCTION : A NALYTICAL P SYCHOLOGY - A N O VERVIEW
When Jung (1875-1961) comments that image alone is the immediate object of knowledge 1 he makes a claim that is immediately appealing to anyone who wants to understand the meanings that lie in, and behind, films, television programmes and the Internet. For Jung, it is through psychological images that it is possible to come to an understanding of ourselves and of our relationship to the world. As will become clear, these two factors, the individual and his or her cultural location, are inseparable.
That this book adopts a post-Jungian approach might seem to suggest the ideas of analytical psychology are more revealing, or insightful, than those of other schools of psychodynamic thought. This is not necessarily so. However, it is the case that they are less well known, and have been subject to less academic scrutiny and debate. It is also true that analytical psychology offers a rather different perspective to psychoanalysis, not necessarily better but different, raising, as it does, fresh problems and new questions. As Terrie Waddell comments:
Reading a text through the framework of one primary theorist helps us to more clearly understand the ideas that they are putting forward, and, if appropriate, revise them. With this methodology in mind, analyzing cultural material through psychological approaches is far from analogous to analyzing actual case studies. The body of work left by Jung might better be understood as a tool that we can use to help us wrestle with meaning. In the academic world the ideas of theorists are rarely taken to be absolutes. 2
With this lack of absolutes firmly in the foreground it is worth introducing another problem. It was not Jung s intention to refer to, or to write about, the media. He was only tangentially interested in their development. This means in the twenty plus volumes which comprise his collected works there are only a handful of references to the media. Jung wrote from the perspective of a clinical physician. As such his terminology can seem at times a little antiquated, a consequence of being part of what at the time was an emerging subject. Why, then, should Jungian clinical psychology be of use in understanding contemporary mediated communications? One answer is that Jung was fundamentally concerned with the relationship between the individual and his or her environment. Some would see this in developmental terms and in so doing would focus on how the child s early environment affects his or her later development - a point discussed later in this chapter. While not detracting from that argument the suggestion here is that in an image saturated culture, a clinical psychology which has at its very core the importance of the image might have some utility in understanding the role that images play culturally.
Jung s language offers a technical vocabulary and is worth keeping in mind that the points he tries to make are not always immediately obvious. For example, in the following quote, as in much of his writing, Jung refers to psychic activities. To dispense with the obvious, Jung is not referring to supernatural or occult behaviour. Instead he means, rather more straightforwardly, psychological activity.
We would expect that all psychic activities would produce images of themselves and that this would be their essential nature without which they could not be called psychic . It is difficult to see why unconscious psychic activities should not have the same faculty of producing images as those that are represented by consciousness. 3
This is an important point. What the term image means in this context is the subject of the next chapter, and to an extent the following one too, but what Jung is suggesting is there is an intrinsic connection between images and unconscious psychological meaning.
Of course, Jung was not the first to suggest that images might have meanings that are not immediately obvious. Freud had done so in his hypotheses about the sexual nature of dream imagery, parapraxis (the so-called Freudian slip) and other momentary lapses in the defences of consciousness. Where Jung differs from his precursors is his insistence on the centrality of the image as a way of understanding the unconscious mechanisms of the psyche. Both Freud s topographic model of the psyche (consciousness, pre-conscious, unconscious) and his later structural model (id, ego, superego) revolved around a view of the psyche in which repression of the unconscious had a central role. The impossibility of the Oedipal situation and the sublimation of sexual libidinal energy is what gave the psyche its dynamic qualities.
Jung adopts a different approach. Like Freud, he suggests that there are essentially three components to the psyche - Consciousness, the Personal Unconscious and the Collective Unconscious (also referred to as the Objective Psyche). Far from repressing the unconscious, Jung s suggestion is that it is vital to bring unconscious contents into consciousness. Repression, or suppression for that matter, as Jung remarks, is as much an option for psychological well-being as beheading is for a headache. 4
While it is not often put in these terms, this insight now permeates most modern psychotherapy and counseling trainings. The reason that all trainees are required to undertake their own personal therapy is precisely to ensure that their own unconscious concerns do not have an adverse effect on the therapeutic relationship. The unconscious needs to be known, not repressed.
By extension it follows that the unconscious has a potentially positive role to play in individuals lives. The notion of the unconscious as a positive agency is something of a departure from the Freudian model. Rather than focusing on the need for repression and the inevitability of a fragmented sense of self, Jung s psychological territory is concerned with projection, transference and image formation. These differences are not absolute and Jung s understanding of the dynamics of the psyche allows for repression and fragmentation just as Freud s view encompasses projection and the creation of symbols.
The distinction is one of degree. Freud tended to see the psyche in terms which looked back to childhood, to the universality of the Oedipal complex and the psycho-social requirement to repress such material. By contrast, Jung tends to view the psyche as striving for balance, for health and as essentially forward-looking or teleological. For Jung the psyche behaves just like the rest of the human organism. When hurt the body tries to heal itself. When under attack from infection it defends itself. So too in psychological terms the psyche strives for an optimal homeostatic condition in which its mechanism for self-regulation and balance can function effectively.
Likewise, the biological aging of the body is mirrored by a psychological aging. To this extent Jung s model of the psyche is a developmental one. Here the term developmental refers in a humanistic sense to the maturing of a psychological relationship with the world over time. It is not used to suggest that developments early in childhood affect our later psychology, although this is certainly the case. While Jung was interested in how family dynamics influe