Psychology of looking

Media are not new things. Its history is as old as the history of human civilization. The facility of visibility in human beings paved way for media of representation. Human ability to look and see things has been the central formative factors in determining the process of representation in relation to the human individual self. Behind this human impulse of looking, interpreting and representing things on their own relation -- that has been the base of all human knowledge till date -- there are some psychological forces at work. Psychologists like Jaques Lacan and Sigmund Freud including the 1970s film critic Laura Mulvey and postmodernist thinker Michael Foucault have presented some very convincing ideas on the dynamics of looking and process of representation.

Sigmund Freud, the first most influential psychologist, gave an insight into human unconscious when he defined human psychology as something not in the control of the self but as collective functioning of three conflicting forces namely: id, ego and superego, which led to the formulation of psychoanalysis. He divided human psychosocial development into three different phases in explaining how a child is socialized and how his psychology works. Freud believed that in course of socialization, every child must pass through the three different phases of psychological development: oral phase, anal phase and latent phase (Malson 17). When a child enters into the latent phase he realizes the sexual deference which contributes to the formation of what he calls “penisenvy” in female child and “castration anxiety” in male child which leads to “Oedipus complex”.
The fear aroused by “castration anxiety” in a male child is instrumental in our analysis of human habit of looking and interpreting things. Though the concept of “lack” in female psychology or the “castration anxiety” in male triggered by the same “lack” has been the subject of much criticism among the feminist theorists, this has been, however, a point of departure for many of them.
Freud’s psychoanalysis here functions as a basic theory for the interpretation of the operation of what we have been calling “the looking culture” or to be more precise the male gaze.
When a child is born, the sex of child is not noticed by the child itself. Since birth to a certain point of realization, both male and female infant grow up in same undifferentiated and engendered state. Both boys and girls take mother as “love-object” (Freud 299) and both share similar experience during oral and anal phases of psychosexual development. And it is not until “the phallic phase” of development that the two sexes begin to diverge psychologically:

During this stage, the penis or clitoris becomes the principle erotogenic zone, and physical differences thus become significant. For boy, phallic eroticism leads to phallic desires for the mother so that the father becomes an oedipal rival. Fearing castration by the father in relation for these desires, he renounces the mother as love-object, forming instead an identification with the father, thus taking up a masculine position. (Malson 13-14)
Then onwards, the child, especially the male one, whenever confronts a female body, begins to experience a “castration anxiety” that any time he could be punished.
The British critic and psychoanalyst, Laura Mulvey, takes this case of child’s “castration anxiety” to a point where he manages to overcome it through a powerful “gaze”, where the fear is transformed into pleasure.
Mulvey reaches to this point by taking up Freudian ideas through Lacan’s psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud, in his Three Essays on Sexuality, invents a term "socopholia" to designate a component instinct of sexuality. "Socopholia," according to Freud is the pleasure a viewer gets from looking at other people or their images which are “under control”.
This pleasure of looking, as Freud says, is triggered by the situation where a viewer can, while looking, take other people as objects, and can subject them to a controlling gaze. Developing this idea, Lacan further interpreted the pleasure of looking as a narcissistic tendency prevalent in every child. He elaborated it through his mirror analogy.
When a child reaches to what he calls “mirror phase” s/he realizes his/her full identity in the reflection of mirror. (Lacan 898).
Jacques Lacan's concept of gaze emerged from this theory of the mirror stage, where a child sees itself in the mirror and misrecognizes it as the real "self". By viewing itself in the mirror, the subject at the mirror stage begins its entrance into culture and language by establishing its own subjectivity through the fantasy image inside the ..........[some sections missing] ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........

[Copyrighted: unauthorized reproduction or copy is prohibited]...........
............. ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ...........  ........... 
................ ..........[some sections missing] ...........ook how this human fascination with image functions in actual life, we must observe our (or the common audiences’) reaction to images that we confront in our day-to-day life. More than anything else, the facility of visual documentation and observation made possible by the advancement of science and technology like cinema, advertisement and photography offers a number of possible pleasures to the viewer. This pleasure is associated with Lacan’s concept of “mirror stare” and the narcissism therein.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Only genuine comments please!

Most Popular Posts