Women and Images of Men in Cinema: Gender Construction in La Belle et la Bête by Jean Cocteau

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Women and men in cinema are imaginary constructs created by filmmakers and their audiences. The film-psychoanalytic approach reveals how movies subliminally influence unconscious reception. On the other hand, the movie is embedded in a cultural tradition: Jean Cocteau‘s film La Belle et la Bête (1946) takes up the classic motif of the animal groom from the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (originally a tale about the stunning momentum of genuine female desire), liberates it from its baroque educational moral (a girl's virtue and prudence will help her to overcome her sexual fears), and turns it into a boyhood story: inside the ugly rascal there is a good, but relatively boring prince – at least in comparison to the monsters of film history.

In the seventy years since it was made, La Belle et la Bête has inspired numerous interpretations and has been employed by theorists of all genres and interests. In this book, Andreas Hamburger and other contributors consider its background, content, and reception, and explore the impact Cocteau has on our perceptions of beauties and beasts.

Introducing the monster as a suffering person, Cocteau’s film reacts to the disturbing experience of World War II and the Holocaust. It questions hegemonial masculinity, designing a poetic, hallucinatory attempt at healing for a traumatized generation. Moreover, it addresses female and male adolescent development. Its deliberately incredible finale ironically portrays traditional constructs of femininity and masculinity, thus going beyond the scope of a compensatory fairy tale.

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Female Sexuality: The Early Psychoanalytic Controversies

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The papers collected together in this volume laid the groundwork for contemporary psychoanalytic women's studies and gender theory. They cover a period from June 1917, when Johan van Ophuijsen presented his paper on the masculinity complex in women to the Dutch Psycho-Analytical Society, to April 1935, when Ernest Jones read a paper on early female sexuality to the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society.

Alhough these papers are often referred to in discussions of female sexuality, and though some individual papers have been reproduced elsewhere, they have never before appeared together as a collection. Anyone who has read these papers will be aware of their importance to the topic of female sexuality, but it is not the theme alone that unifies the collection. There are two further considerations of equal importance: the dialogue and debate that take place between the papers, from first to last; and the considerable impact they had on the development of certain of Freud's key theses. The papers have a clear historical interest but rereading them today will also show their continuing relevance to debates within and outside psychoanalysis on female sexuality.

This collection contains papers by Karl Abraham, Marie Bonaparte, Ruth Mack Brunswick, Helene Deutsch, Otto Fenichel, Karen Horney, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Jeanne Lampl de Groot, Josine Müller, Carl Müller-Braunschweig, Johan H. W. van Ophuijsen, Joan Riviere, and August Stärcke.

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Subject of Anthropology: Gender, Symbolism and Psychoanalysis

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This new book draws on anthropology, feminism and psychoanalysis to develop an original and provocative theory of gender and of how we become sexed beings. Written not just for professional scholars and for students but for anyone with a serious interest in how gender and sexuality are conceptualised, experienced and imagined.

Sexual Ambiguities: Sexuation and Psychosis

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How does one become a man or a woman? Psychoanalysis shows that this is never an easy task and that each of us tackles it in our own, unique way. In this important and original study, Genevieve Morel focuses on what analytic work with psychotic subjects can teach us about the different solutions human beings can construct to the question of sexual identity.

Through a careful exposition of Lacanian theory, Morel argues that classical gender theory is misguided in its notion of 'gender identity' and that Lacan's concept of 'sexuation' is more precise. Clinical case studies illustrate how sexuation occurs and the ambiguities that may surround it. In psychosis, these ambiguities are often central, and Morel explores how they may or may not be resolved thanks to the individual's own constructions. This book is not only a major contribution to gender studies but also an invaluable aid to the clinician dealing with questions of sexual identity.

The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender by Nancy J. Chodorow

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When this best-seller was published, it put the mother-daughter relationship and female psychology on the map. The Reproduction of Mothering was chosen by Contemporary Sociology as one of the ten most influential books of the past twenty-five years. With a new preface by the author, this updated edition is testament to the formative effect that Nancy Chodorow's work continues to exert on psychoanalysis, social science, and the humanities.

Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice by Nancy J. Chodorow

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Nancy Chodorow, in her groundbreaking book The Reproduction of Mothering, quite simply changed the conversation in at least three areas of study: psychoanalysis, women's studies, and sociology. In her latest book, Individualizing Gender and Sexuality, she examines the complexity and uniqueness of each person's personal creation of sexuality and gender and the ways that these interrelate with other aspects of psychic and cultural life. She brings her well-known theoretical agility, wide-ranging interdisciplinarity, and clinical experience to every chapter, advocating for the clinician's openness, curiosity, and theoretical pluralism. The book begins with reflections on Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, followed by considerations of Melanie Klein and Stephen Mitchell, as well as on her own work and on the postmodern turn in psychoanalytic gender theory. Subsequent chapters address contemporary clinical-cultural issues such as women and work, women and motherhood, and men and violence. Concluding chapters elaborate on the multiple ingredients and the personal affective, conflictual, and defensive constellations and processes that create sexuality and gender in each individual. Ending with a chapter on homosexualities as compromise formations, Chodorow deepens her account of clinical individuality and sex-gender transference-countertransference while bringing her readers back to Freud and to the many strands that followed, as she consolidates a consistent line of interest in sexuality and gender, theory and practice, sustained over a lifetime.

Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond by Nancy J. Chodorow

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Nancy J. Chodorow takes her fellow psychoanalysts to task for their monolithic and pathologizing accounts of deviant gender and sexuality. Drawing from her own clinical experience, the work of Freud, and a close reading of psychoanalytic texts, Chodorow argues that psychoanalysis has yet to disentangle male dominance from heterosexuality. Further, she demonstrates the paucity of psychoanalytics understanding of heterosexuality and the problematic polarizing of normal and abnormal sexualities. By returning to Freud and interpreting psychoanalysis through clinical eyes, Chodorow contends that psychoanalysis must consider individual specificity and personal, cultural, and social factors. Such a methodology entails a plurality of femininities and masculinities and enables us to understand a variety of sexualities.

Women in the Works of Lou Andreas-Salomé: Negotiating Identity

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The writer and intellectual Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) fascinates scholars of German literature because of her associations with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud and because she was active in the cultural and intellectual vanguard of late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and Austria. Recent editions of her fictional works have garnered wider attention from scholars of literature and theory, particularly those interested in women's studies, identity politics, and narrative theory. This study analyzes how Andreas-Salomé depicted women in her fictional works just as feminism was emerging, revealing a complex engagement with questions of narrative and identity.

More than mere thematic explorations of women's changing roles in society, her works investigate the concept of identity and its relationship to gender, sexuality, and narrative representation. She is as concerned with a cultural crisis of femininity and masculinity as with the identity crises of her individual women characters. This book offers the best account of Andreas-Salomé's literary works, de-emphasizing biographical and psychoanalytical perspectives but taking into account the sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts in which they were written. It also adds to contemporary theoretical discourses on gender, feminism, and identity. Muriel Cormican is Professor of German at the University of West Georgia, Carrollton, Georgia.

Lou Andreas-Salomé - Quotes

Jacques Lacan: On the Names-of-the-Father

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What astonishing success the Name-of-the-Father has had! Everyone finds something in it. Who one's father is isn't immediately obvious, hardly being visible to the naked eye. Paternity is first and foremost determined by one's culture. As Lacan said, "The Name-of-the-Father creates the function of the father." But then where does the plural stem from?

It isn't pagan, for it is found in the Bible. He who speaks from the burning bush says of Himself that He doesn't have just one Name. In other words, the Father has no proper Name. It is not a figure of speech, but rather a function. The Father has as many names as the function has props.

What is its function? The religious function par excellence, that of tying things together. What things? The signifier and the signified, law and desire, thought and the body. In short, the symbolic and the imaginary. Yet if these two become tied to the real in a three-part knot, the Name-of-the-Father is no longer anything but mere semblance. On the other hand, if without it everything falls apart, it is the symptom of a failed knotting.

- Jacques-Alain Miller

The Freudian Father's Day Gift Guide

Table of Contents
Foreword by Jacques-Alain Miller
The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real
Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father
Bio-bibliographical Notes
Translator’s Notes

• Jacques Lacan was one of the leading thinkers of the 20th Century and the most influential psychoanalyst after Freud. His work has been hugely influential across a wide range of disciplines, from philosophy and psychology to literary theory, critical theory, gender studies and cultural studies.

• This is one of Lacan’s most famous and influential works and it is crucial for understanding the development of his thinking.

• The book is comprised of two key texts that were decisive in the making of Jacques Lacan - one which introduces for the first time his key concepts of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real, and another which he wrote just at the moment when he split off from mainstream psychoanalysis.

• This important new book, now available for the first time in English, will be of great interest to students and scholars in scholars in psychoanalysis, critical theory, literary theory, gender studies, philosophy and the humanities and social sciences generally.

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See also

 Lacan For Beginners

Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide