The Psychotic Spectator who Transgresses

Abstract

The previous chapter signaled some of the ways in which neurosis and psychosis establish, and operate, different sorts of relationships to reality. This allowed us to mark some of the differences between these two orders in terms of the representational fields of madness as well as the act of cinema spectatorship. The following section continues these ideas, pursuing this time psychosis and cinema. The first part of the chapter will look at the difficulties of psychosis and language, and how psychoanalysis has positioned this as one of the key defining aspects. This, in turn, will allow us to compare the language of the psychotic to different aspects of cinema. One of the key aspects to be considered will be the ways in which the spectator ‘adopts’ a type of psychotic language in order to watch a film. This will include the idea of cinematic language as a type of disturbance. The final section of the chapter will examine hallucination in psychosis and how cinema can be seen to perform a similar process.