The Process of Free Association and Film as an Evocative Object

Comanducci, Carlo

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1_5

Carlo Comanducci²

495 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter addresses how contingency can become a creative part of language, dialogue and spectatorship, through a discussion of the free associative dimension of film experience and of film as an evocative object. A return to the theoretical import of the method and the process of free association in psychoanalytic theory is offered, through a particular focus on the work of Jean-Bertrand Pontalis and Christopher Bollas, as an alternative approach to a psychoanalytic theory of film experience which foregrounds the dialogic nature of the psychoanalytic encounter and of psychic experience as such.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 39.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Softcover Book: USD 54.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 84.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
See Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 2005 [1986]), 199–200.
2.
Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 2009 [1994]), 9.
3.
Elizabeth Cowie , Representing the Woman : Cinema and Psychoanalysis (London: Macmillan, 1997), 75.
4.
If gender , in Judith Butler ’s understanding is “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being,” then the discipline of spectatorship , a repeated stylization of the looking body, would constitute in itself (before any further inscription of the heterosexual gender binary in spectatorship and spectatorship theory ) an act of normative sexuation. See Laura Mulvey, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 48.
5.
Cowie, Representing the Woman , 165.
6.
Ibid., 286.
7.
Ibid., 165.
8.
Pontalis, Après Freud, 13.
9.
Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unconscious Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4.
10.
Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , The Language of Psycho-analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 249.
11.
Judith Mayne , Cinema and Spectatorship (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 20.
12.
Louis Althusser , Lenin and Philosophy: And Other Essays (London: Unwin Brothers, 1971), 183.
13.
Ibid., 184.
14.
Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot,” Yale French Studies 55–56 (1977): 285.
15.
Sigmund Freud , “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” in Freud: Complete Works, ed. Ivan Smith (2000 [1937]), 5022.
16.
The concept of analytic field (campo analitico) is characteristic of the work of the Italian psychoanalyst Antonino Ferro, who drew from Kurt Levin, Madeleine Baranger and Wilfred Bion for its elaboration. With this concept, Ferro refers to the conscious and unconscious , emotive and semantic space that the analyst and the analysand evoke and inhabit during the session, and, more generally, to what “happens” in the transferal relation that is established between the two. Through this, Ferro proposes an approach to analytic technique and, in particular, to interpretation , that is based more on the collaboration of analysand and analyst than in the latter’s authority or skill. See Antonino Ferro, The Bipersonal Field: Experiences in Child Analysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
17.
Quoted in Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, 106.
18.
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , Avant (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), 51. See also Catalina Bronstein, “On Free Association and Psychic Reality.” British Journal of Psychotherapy 18, no. 4 (2002): 478.
19.
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , Ce Temps Qui ne Passe Pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 35.
20.
Ibid., 16–17.
21.
Pontalis, Avant, 114.
22.
Pontalis, Ce Temps Qui ne Passe Pas, 35.
23.
Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), 105.
24.
Christopher Bollas , The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis and the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press), 202.
25.
Ibid., 255.
26.
“La psychanalyse m’assomme quand elle entre, sans y être invité, en tout lieu, s’affirme comme l’interprétation de toutes interprétations possibles. Je revendique pour tout un chacun non le refuge dans l’ininterprétable mais un territoire, aux frontières mouvantes, de l’ininterpreté.” Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , L’Amour des Commencements (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 27. Translation mine.
27.
Christopher Bollas , The Evocative Object World (New York: Routledge, 2009), 14.
28.
Pontalis, Après Freud, 118.
29.
For one of Žižek’s versions of the story, see Cornel West and Slavoj Žižek , Talk at Princeton University, 5 May (2005), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBvASueefk4. Accessed 13 July 2018.
30.
Pontalis, Après Freud, 13.
31.
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , Fenêtres (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 23.
32.
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , En Marge des Nuits (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 20.
33.
See Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , Entre le Rêve et la Douleur (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 19. Also see Bollas, The Evocative Object, 36: “every dream fulfils the wish to dream.”
34.
“Comme le rêve, l’analyse tout à la fois ouvre à l’illimité et l’apprivoise.” Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , La Force d’Attraction (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 54. Translation mine.
35.
Pontalis. L’Amour des Commencements, 24.
36.
“À tout ce qui reste dans le marges de la prose de la vie […] elle doit donc se garder de substituer à cette singularité un ordre préétabli de rélations, fut-il constitué par le savoir qui s’est organisé à partir de ses découvertes. L’ordre qui lui convient est exactement l’inverse.” Pontalis, Après Freud, 39. Translation mine.
37.
“[…] Dans la mesure où, cette région de l’être que Freud à tirée de la nuit, et à laquelle il est si difficile d’assigner un statut ontologique, doit son efficacité structurante précisément ay fait de sa latence: elle est transindividuelle et présubjective, transtemporelle, ou hors de la série temporelle des événements, et laisse la conscience, sinon sans savoir, du moins sans prise.” Ibid., 19. Translation mine.
38.
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , La Traversée des Ombres (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 179.
39.
Pontalis, Fenêtres, 37.
40.
Bollas, The Evocative Object World, 24.
41.
Pontalis, L’Amour des Commencements, 33.
42.
Leo Bersani , Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 11.
43.
Ibid., 11–12.
44.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 67. Although I am considering here the limitations that the social symbolic system imposes on the speaking subject, more than the benefits Kristeva envisaged, I agree with her that a distinction between these two dimensions is fundamental. The incommensurability between these two orders, eventually means that the signifying process is “the only concrete universality that defines the speaking being.” Ibid.
45.
See Jacques Rancière , The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 552.
46.
Not to be confused with Freud’s idea of psychic determinism.
47.
Bollas, Evocative Object, 15.
48.
“By exploring anomalies between form and content, psychoanalytic theories of the image can be articulated with a more detailed approach that pays due attention to the idiosyncratic associations through which individual viewers flesh out such tensions.” Jennifer Friedlander , Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship , Subversion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 30. Emphasis added. For a critique of the use of psychoanalytic theory in film studies exclusively in relation to the textual dimension, see Valerie Walkerdine, “Video Replay: Families, Film and Fantasy ,” in Formations of Fantasy , ed. Victor Burgin , James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986), 168: “psychoanalysis is used,” Walkerdine writes, “to explore the relations within a film rather than to explain the engagement with the film by viewers already inserted in a multiplicity of sites for identification .”
49.
Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud , “Studies on Hysteria,” in Freud: Complete Works, ed. Ivan Smith (2000 [1895]), 102. Emphasis added.
50.
Ibid., 12.
51.
Pontalis, Fenêtres, 109. Translation mine.
52.
Breuer and Freud, “Studies on Hysteria,” 12.
53.
Ibid., 17.
54.
Ibid., 66. Also see Yoav Yigael, “‘The Primary Process:’ The Vicissitude of a Concept,” International Forum of Psychoanalysis 14, no. 2 (2005): 77. One should note that the method of free association replaced hypnosis precisely as Freud became convinced that the kind of free talk that the patient under hypnosis was producing could be reproduced in a state of wakefulness through free association. See Breuer and Freud, “Studies on Hysteria,” 54, note 1. At the same time, Freud realized that a certain kind of resistance, especially connected with sexual ideas, was present both in conscious life and in the hypnotic state, thus compromising what he had thought to be the specific usefulness of the latter. See ibid., 73.
55.
Breuer and Freud, “Studies on Hysteria,” 79.
56.
Ibid., 102.
57.
Ibid., 158.
58.
Ibid., 66, 86, 130.
59.
Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, 90.
60.
See Elizabeth Allison, “Observing the Observer: Freud and the Limits of Empiricism,” British Journal of Psychotherapy 33, no. 1 (2017): 94–95.
61.
Breuer and Freud, “Studies on Hysteria,” 151.
62.
Sigmund Freud , “Screen Memories,” in Freud: Complete Works, ed. Ivan Smith (2000 [1899]), 490. Emphasis added.
63.
Ibid., 501.
64.
Ibid., 491.
65.
Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, 228.
66.
Bollas, The Evocative Object, 10.
67.
Sigmund Freud , “The Interpretation of Dreams,” in Freud: Complete Works, ed. Ivan Smith (2000), 606.
68.
Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, 169.
69.
“Par l’analyse, le langage est délié de toute fonction. Il est comme rendu à sa puissance et à son infirmité foncières. Il porte et déporte vers ce que lui échappe. Il est transporté hors de lui, il est transfert.” Pontalis, Ce Temps Qui ne Passe Pas, 33. Translation and emphasis mine.
70.
Christopher Bollas , Free Association (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002), 7.
71.
Bollas, The Evocative Object, 4.
72.
Ibid., 73, note 2.
73.
Ibid., 14.
74.
Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, 170.
75.
“It seems difficult and perhaps wrong to dissociate the process of ‘free association’ from the psychic process that mobilizes the associations.” Bronstein, “On Free Association,” 480.
76.
Bollas, Free Association, 67.
77.
Bollas, The Evocative Object, 5.
78.
Ibid., 14.
79.
Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, 43.
80.
Pontalis, Après Freud, 39.
81.
Pontalis, En Marge des Nuits, 112.
82.
Pontalis, L’Amour des Commencements, 148. Also, if Žižek can describe thought as a radical suspension of being, as a break in the reproduction of the life cycle, it is precisely because thought proceeds not only associatively but through instances of Einfall . See Slavoj Žižek , The Parallax View (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2006), 6.
83.
“L’analyste peut prescrire: associez’. Il ne peut pas exiger que l’inattendu vienne à la rencontre de ses patients, ou de lui-même […].” Pontalis, En Marge des Nuits, 112. Translation mine.
84.
Pontalis, L’Amour des Commencements, 115.
85.
Sigmund Freud , “The Interpretation of Dreams,” in Freud: Complete Works, ed. Ivan Smith (2000 [1900]), 673.
86.
See Christopher Bollas , Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience (London: Routledge, 1995), 168–169.
87.
Pontalis, Ce Temps Qui ne Passe Pas, 115. Translation and emphasis mine.
88.
Bollas, The Evocative Object, 25.
89.
Cfr. Cowie, Representing the Woman , 127.
90.
Bollas, The Evocative Object, 1.
91.
Bronstein, “On Free Association,” 479.
92.
Bollas, The Evocative Object, 39.
93.
Ibid., 54.
94.
Ibid., 56.
95.
One should not take this emphasis on spectatorship and film experience as a way to make light of the art of filmmaking . On the contrary, this foregrounding is also a way to emphasize filmmaking as the production of sets of tensions within associative fields. Steven Shaviro provides us with an example in relation to film editing: “the ‘lines of flight’ opened up by the material practice of film editing are never entirely effaced, even when they are recuperated in the stratifications of continuity rules. Every attempt to manipulate and to order the flow of images only strengthens the tendential forces that uproot this flow from any stability of meaning and reference.” He then concludes that “cinematic vision pushes toward a condition of freeplay: the incessant metamorphosis of immanent, inconstant appearances.” Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 39.
96.
Bollas, The Evocative Object, 79.
97.
Victor Burgin , The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 15.
98.
Ibid., 14.
99.
Ibid., 15–16.
100.
Victor Burgin , Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), 299.
101.
Ibid., 305.
102.
Jacques Rancière , The Emancipated Spectator (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 139–140.
103.
Jacques Rancière , Dissensus : On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 117.

Bibliography

Allison, Elizabeth. “Observing the Observer: Freud and the Limits of Empiricism.” British Journal of Psychotherapy 33, no. 1 (2017): 93–104.
Article Google Scholar
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 127–186. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
Google Scholar
Bersani, Leo. Baudelaire and Freud. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977.
Google Scholar
Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis and the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Google Scholar
Bollas, Christopher. Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience. London: Routledge, 1995.
Google Scholar
Bollas, Christopher. Free Association. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002.
Google Scholar
Bollas, Christopher. The Evocative Object World. London: Routledge, 2008.
Google Scholar
Bronstein, Catalina. “On Free Association and Psychic Reality.” British Journal of Psychotherapy 18, no. 4 (2002): 477–489.
Article Google Scholar
Brooks, Peter. “Freud’s Masterplot.” Yale French Studies 55–56 (1977): 280–300.
Article Google Scholar
Burgin, Victor. Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009.
Google Scholar
Burgin, Victor. The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2012.
Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.
Google Scholar
Cowie, Elizabeth. Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. London: Macmillan, 1997.
Book Google Scholar
Ferro, Antonino. The Bipersonal Field: Experiences in Child Analysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Freud: Complete Works, edited by Ivan Smith, 2000. https://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf. Accessed 12 July 2018.
Friedlander, Jennifer. Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008.
Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Google Scholar
Laplanche, Jacques, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-analysis. London: The Hogarth Press, 1983.
Google Scholar
Mayne, Judith. Cinema and Spectatorship. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
Book Google Scholar
Phillips, Adam. On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unconscious Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Google Scholar
Phillips, Adam. On Flirtation. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.
Google Scholar
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. Entre le Rêve et la Douleur. Paris: Gallimard, 1977.
Google Scholar
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. L’Amour des Commencements. Paris: Gallimard, 1986.
Google Scholar
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. La Force d’Attraction. Paris: Seuil, 1990.
Google Scholar
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. Après Freud. Paris: Gallimard, 1993.
Google Scholar
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. Ce Temps qui ne Passe Pas. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
Google Scholar
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. Fenêtres. Paris: Gallimard, 2000.
Google Scholar
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. Traversée des Ombres. Paris: Gallimard, 2003.
Google Scholar
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. En Marge des Nuits. Paris: Gallimard, 2010.
Google Scholar
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. Avant. Paris: Gallimard, 2012.
Google Scholar
Rancière, Jacques. The Philosopher and His Poor. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.
Google Scholar
Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. London and New York: Verso, 2009.
Google Scholar
Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury, 2010.
Google Scholar
Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso, 2005.
Google Scholar
Shaviro, Stephen. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Google Scholar
Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Google Scholar
Yigael, Yoav. “The Primary Process: The Vicissitude of a Concept.” International Forum of Psychoanalysis 14, no. 2 (2005): 76–85.
Article Google Scholar
Walkerdine, Valerie. “Video Replay: Families, Film and Fantasy.” In Formations of Fantasy, edited by Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan, 167–199. London and New York: Methuen, 1986.
Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2006.
Google Scholar

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Vistula University, Warsaw, Poland
Carlo Comanducci

Authors

Carlo Comanducci
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Carlo Comanducci .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Comanducci, C. (2018). The Process of Free Association and Film as an Evocative Object. In: Spectatorship and Film Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1_5

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1_5
Published: 28 August 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96742-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96743-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics