Freud and the Death-Mother

Abstract

As Film Studies has amply demonstrated, Freudian theory exerted a profound influence over the content and thematic preoccupations of classical Hollywood. In this chapter, I make the case that narratives of femininity in classical myth, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Hollywood film are analogous mythologies, abstract versions of the social and cultural conditions that produce gender and sexual identities, which in turn shape these productions. Like classical myth—to which I turn in the next chapter—Freud’s work engages in misogynistic, constrictive constructions of femininity. I believe that, as Jonathan Dollimore has astutely encouraged us to do, we should read Freud allegorically.¹ Read in this manner, Freud’s accounts of femininity can, at times, have a genuine insight and resonance. Whether or not one finds Freud insightful on matters of femininity, what is undeniable is the correspondence between his views of women’s situation and female strategies to circumvent it and those propounded in Hollywood film.