Abstract
The patriarchal unconscious is put “on trial” in this chapter through its resemblance to early modern ideas of the imagination. In the early modern period, witches and pregnant women were persecuted, scapegoated and reified according to their psycho-sexual capacity to corrupt body-image and the perception of reality. This chapter will show a figurative link between this historical belief and the notion of objectification in feminist film theory. The figures of the witch and maternal imagination are argued to form an ideal paradigm through which to restage an examination and analysis of the theories of origins and processes of originality in film theory, enabling a different perspective where the psyche and libidinal desire are not captured in a literal sense but in a historical and material sense. Studies of the supposed power of the ultrasound (Kukla, Motherhood and Space: Configurations of the Maternal Through Politics, Home and the Body. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn.) are further discussed in light of the maternal imagination to question claims of subordination by cinema and visual culture.
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Notes
- 1.
On the torture of witches, Warner writes: “The rule was that if the water rejected the woman, if the pure element spewed her forth, then she was a witch. If she remained under, then she was innocent of a league with the devil. It is a physical law that a body will float, even if clothed … the sufferer of the ordeal is dependent on the unconscious leanings of the crowd” (1981: 20).
- 2.
See also Francesco Maria Guazzo’s Compendium Maleficarum (Dover Publications, 1988).
- 3.
Whether and how God permitted the existence of witches and thus of evil is discussed at length by the authors, but not worth delving into here.
- 4.
The degree to which we should accept castration has of course been debated and interrogated; however, this debate arguably has remained within the psychoanalytic paradigm where we still accept the fundamental link between patriarchy and the need to discourse against cinema’s unconscious effects. See Constance Penley (2013).
- 5.
The idea of a psycho-somatic effect is a related, but more complicated topic. The modern incarnation of, what is now called conversion disorder, is in Freud’s theorisation of hysteria where he argued that mental illness “broke the rules” of scientific aetiology as no organic cause could be found. The cause of patients suffering nervous compulsions, tics and bodily complaints was, as he suggests in this essay, an impossible source. Hysteria was a “representational paralysis” insofar as it bore no relation to the anatomy of the sufferer, except that it was important despite its representational status as it was lived and real for the sufferer. He would eventually call the source of this condition the unconscious and would argue that the talking cure (therapy) alleviated the problem (Freud 2001a).
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Bliss, L. (2020). Guilty as Charged: Feminist Film Theory and the Early Modern Imagination. In: The Maternal Imagination of Film and Film Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45897-3_2
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