Bion in Film Theory and Analysis

The Retreat in Film

Carla Ambrósio Garcia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317274520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

In Bion in Film Theory and Analysis: The Retreat in Film, Carla Ambrósio Garcia introduces the rich potential of the thinking of British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion for film theory. By so doing, she rethinks the space of the cinema as a space of retreat, and brings new insights into the representation of retreat in film.

Presented in two parts, the book seeks to deepen our understanding of the film experience and psychical growth. Part I places Bion's view on the importance of the epistemophilic instinct at the heart of a critique of the pleasure-centred theories of the cinematic apparatus of Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz and Gaylyn Studlar, proposing an idea of cinema as 'thoughts in search of a thinker'. Garcia then moves from Bion's epistemological period to his later work, which draws on mysticism, in order to posit an emotional experience in the cinema through which the subject can be or become real (or at one with 'O'). Part II examines representations of retreat in four European films, directed by Ingmar Bergman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Georges Perec and Bernard Queysanne, and Manoel de Oliveira, showing them to articulate a gesture of retreat as an emotionally turbulent transitional stage in the development of the psyche – what Bion conceptualizes as caesura.

Through its investigation of the retreat in cinema, the book challenges common understandings of retreat as a regressive movement by presenting it as a gesture and space that can also be future-oriented. Bion in Film Theory and Analysis will be of significant interest to academics and students of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and film and media studies, as well as psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

PART I
The retreat in cinema

1
RETHINKING THE CINEMATIC APPARATUS WITH BION’S THEORY OF THINKING

Introduction

There are three main points in Jean-Louis Baudry’s article titled ‘The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema’ (1975) that I will address. The first is Baudry’s contention that the cinematic apparatus engenders a state of artificial regression to a pleasurable moment in the subject’s relationship with the breast; the second is his understanding of the cinema as a place where the unconscious, in the Freudian sense, is represented; and the third is the parallel he draws between Plato’s cave and the apparatus. My first question is, if traces of regression to a primordial stage are manifest in the subject – and in how the apparatus is constructed – what does this regressive state involve? Then, I ask, if the unconscious is represented in the cinema, how can this be considered beyond Freud’s metapsychology? And finally, how can psychoanalysis further expose the implications and inadequacy of the analogy between Plato’s scheme and the cinema? I will address the first and second questions in this first chapter, and the third question in Chapter 2.

The dream-screen: wish-fulfilment?

In the initial pages of his article, Baudry tries to find a correspondence between Plato’s allegorical topos and Freud’s topographical model of the mind. Baudry speculates whether he can superimpose the outside world with the analyst’s conscious, and the philosopher’s cave with the unconscious. He is aware of the difficulties of such an endeavour, as he observes that what is real for Plato and what is real for Freud do not share the same location (p. 302). Nevertheless, Baudry pursues his tentative association of the cave, the unconscious and the cinematic apparatus by noting where several aspects of the functioning of these loci seem to overlap.

The most immediate of these aspects is the resemblance of the mode of operation of Plato’s cave to that of the cinematic apparatus: the darkness of the space, the projection of light and shadow on the wall, the voices of the hidden passers-by taken for the voices of the projected objects, the immobility of the prisoner-subject. Baudry is also interested in the impression of reality experienced by the prisoners in the cave, which he sees as no different from hallucination in a waking state, and dream in sleeping (ibid.). And so he turns to Freud’s work on dreams and discovers a few observations that he finds useful for his argument:

After having shown how the [analytic] treatment gets itself represented [in dreams], Freud comes to the unconscious. ‘If the unconscious, insofar as it belongs to waking thought, needs to be represented in dreams, it is represented in them in underground places.’ Freud adds the following which, because of the above, is very interesting: ‘Outside of analytic treatment, these representations would have symbolized the woman’s body or the womb.’

(pp. 307–8)

This passage in Baudry’s text occurs after he refers to the fact that caves have often been considered as representations of the maternal womb (p. 306). Freud’s statement introduces an additional signified to the cave, or underground chamber: in dreams, it represents the unconscious. Further on, Baudry quotes Freud again, who states that from a somatic point of view, sleep is a return to the time spent in the body of the mother. The sleeping state induces two types of regression: a temporal regression to a period of hallucinatory satisfaction of desire and to a primal narcissism; and topical regression, which by permitting easier communication among conscious, pre-conscious and unconscious, allows cathetic representations to be perceived (pp. 308–9).

Baudry then moves dream a step closer to the cinematic apparatus by introducing Bertram Lewin’s concept of the dream screen, inspired by the cinema screen in its unobtrusiveness, and defined as the surface on which a dream appears to be projected (p. 310). The dream screen is a hallucinatory representation of the breast on which the infant used to fall asleep after feeding, and so it reproduces an early state of satisfaction. He describes Lewin’s hypothesis of the dream screen as corresponding to the desire to be asleep, and the projected dream images to the desire to be awake; Baudry sees these two forces resulting in a hallucinated more-than-real, characteristic of the dream state in its desire for both wished representations and contact with the real. Lewin’s concept of the dream screen pertains to the oral phase, specifically to the time before the mirror stage, when the infant still fails to differentiate between representation and perception, and to locate the limits of the body (p. 311).

In a previous article titled ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’ (1970), it is the scene of the mirror stage that Baudry relates to the cinematic situation. He sees this scene re-enacted not only in the subject’s identification with what is represented on the screen, but also in an identification with a transcendental self that operates as the camera, in that it assembles fragments of experience into unifying meaning, like the mirror assembles a fragmented body into an imaginary whole (pp. 293–5). The fact that the screen never (or almost never) reflects the subject’s own body, also recognized by Christian Metz (1975a, p. 45),¹ changes Baudry’s focus from the mirror stage to an earlier period in the oral phase. But specular processes of identification are not completely disregarded in the subsequent article ‘The Apparatus’. The pleasure derived from the operation of these processes is only one of those Baudry finds to explain the subject’s relation to the cinematic projection. The darkened theatre, the immobility of the subject and the projection of images are conducive to a regression of the libido to a primal narcissism that is typically experienced by the dreamer, and to a moment of satisfaction in the infant-breast relationship, part of a phase of development where the interior is confused with the exterior (1975, p. 313). Baudry expands on this state of fusion of the body with the environment, experienced by the dreamer and the subject in the cinema, as an effect caused by the succession of images and by the subject’s motor inhibition, which subdues reality testing and thus leads the subject to perceive representations as reality. This brings Baudry to his concluding remarks on the issue of the impression of reality in the cinema:

If the confusion between representation and perception is characteristic of the primary process which is governed by the pleasure principle, and which is the basic condition for the satisfaction produced by hallucination, the cinematographic apparatus appears to succeed in suspending the secondary process and anything having to do with the principle of reality without eliminating it completely.

(p. 314)

For Baudry, the impression of reality in the cinema is precisely engendered by the partial suppression of the secondary process and the reality principle. Still, as Freud postulated, the repetitive phenomenon of traumatic dream is not governed by the pleasure principle, and yet it is a representation passing for perception. In Baudry’s article, the only reference to Freud’s theory of what is beyond the pleasure principle is made when he considers that Plato’s prisoners would rather perpetuate their immobility inside the cave than go outside: ‘Initial constraint which seems in this way to turn itself into a kind of spite or at least to inscribe the compulsion to repeat, the return to a former condition’ (p. 303). Yet Baudry only takes up this idea of the prisoners’ immobility, in his view similar to that of the infant, the sleeper and the subject in the cinema, insofar as it precludes reality testing.

Turning for a moment to Donald Meltzer’s commentary on Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, it becomes apparent that Baudry does not take into account some of the mechanisms underlying dreams. Meltzer states that Freud realized his dream theory was inadequate to understand the dreams repeatedly had by analysands suffering from traumatic war neuroses. These dreams were mere repetitions of the traumatic experience, or expected traumatic experience, and thus they did not follow a dream structure that could be subsumed under wish-fulfilment dream theory, or failure of wish-fulfilment as in anxiety dream theory. Meltzer explains how Freud resolved this problem:

At the most primitive levels of instinct, the instincts manifest an economic principle which is in essence a mindless compulsion to repeat: to repeat in a sense that is ‘beyond’ the pleasure principle, that is, having nothing to do with questions of pleasure or pain, but being simply the tendency to repeat endlessly the experience by which an instinct has manifested itself in the primitive organization of the child’s mind and relationships.²

(1978, I, pp. 116–17)

Meltzer includes a critique of Freud’s theory, which gives some indication of the Kleinian developments that it was to undergo at a later point. Meltzer defends that the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, written as early as 1895, can be used as a template for recognizing Freud’s preconceptions when thinking about clinical data (p. 6). In the first three parts of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud proposes the new economic principle of repetition compulsion in an attempt to understand the traumatic neuroses, the repetitiveness of children’s play and the reliving of unpleasurable childhood events in the transference. Meltzer considers this to be the clinical part of the paper, but the remainder he sees as an ‘extremely elaborate speculation’ concerned with the aims of the ‘Project’, when Freud proposes that the compulsion to repeat is in fact a compulsion to return to an inorganic state (p. 117). Meltzer also underlines that the emotions of love and hate, which are attached to the life and death instincts, have no mention in Freud’s paper, and thus his theory is one where affects and meaning have no place. He writes:

Freud enunciates the significance of a life instinct which is constructive, building greater units; and a death instinct which destructively tears them down, reducing life to an inorganic state; but of course this says nothing about the meaning which these processes have as they manifest themselves in mental life. Therefore it can be (and is) linked with biology and the behaviour of the protozoa; with the ‘Project’ ‘s scheme for the distribution of excitations and the reduction of tensions to a minimum; with the constancy principle and the Nirvana principle.

(Meltzer, p. 118)

So what are, in Meltzer’s view, Freud’s advancements with ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’? Freud can now conceive of destructiveness as an instinctual force, as opposed to its being simply the outcome of a frustrated sexual instinct. This primary destructiveness is the death instinct, under which category can fall, and which partly elucidates, cruelty, violence and sado-masochism (ibid.). Masochism, the traumatic neuroses and the phenomenon of transference can now be located under the economic principle of repetition compulsion. Still, Meltzer expresses his belief that Freud did not view this new theory of the instincts as introducing any major changes in his conception of mental functioning, but only that it provided a more flexible framework for the manipulation of cathexes. It is worth noting that masochism, about which more will be said later, is the only phenomenon in Meltzer’s text to appear both under the death instinct and the repetition compulsion categories.

To continue the review of Baudry’s article, it is only necessary at this stage to reiterate that Baudry’s use of psychoanalytic theory in his conceptualization of the cinematic apparatus rests in a conception of dream as wish-fulfilment; in pleasurable identification processes rooted in the mirror stage; and in the concept of the dream screen, formed during a pleasurable moment in the oral phase to which the subject in the cinema regresses. The principle of repetition compulsion and the working of the death instinct are omitted from his theory. Nevertheless, in the last footnote of the article, Baudry opens up the issue of the cinematic apparatus to further development, and if his suggestion is followed, the neglected concept of the death instinct is going to feature prominently. He begins by stating that the idea of regression to a moment in the oral phase may seem strange in connection with the cinema, but then he explains that in the cinema situation the visual orifice has taken the place of the mouth. The last sentence reads: ‘In the same order of ideas, it may be useful to reintroduce Melanie Klein’s hypothesis on the oral phase, her extremely complex dialectics between the inside and the outside which refer to reciprocal forms of development’ (p. 318). Baudry did not take this task on, and so to see what these complex dialectics may be, is what I propose to do next.

Kleinian developments

In her 1958 paper on the development of mental functioning, Klein considers Freud’s discovery of the life and death instincts as a major breakthrough in the understanding of the mind (p. 236). But Klein places greater emphasis on destructive impulses and aggression than Freud, who gives more importance to the libido. Klein writes:

Although long before he discovered the life and death instincts he had seen the importance of the destructive component of sexuality in the form of sadism, he did not give sufficient weight to aggression in its impact on emotional life. Perhaps, therefore, he never fully worked out his discovery of the two instincts and seemed reluctant to extend it to the whole of mental functioning.

(p. 245)

The operation of the life and death instincts gives rise to a complex interaction of anxieties, defences and object relations during the first year of the life of the infant, which Klein divides into the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position (1952, p. 61). The term ‘position’ is meant to describe, better than ‘phase’ or ‘stage’, particular configurations of object relations that recur throughout life (p. 93).

The paranoid-schizoid position, mostly active during the first three to four months, derives its name from the preponderance of paranoid anxiety and splitting (p. 70). The infant’s fear of annihilation and the anxiety produced from the experience of birth and from the loss of the intra-uterine state cause aggressive impulses to be split off from the ego and projected into the breast, or bottle. In this way the primal process of projection is used to deflect the death instinct outwards, turning the breast into a bad, persecuting object, which is hated; the projection of the life instinct in the form of libidinal impulses turns the breast into a loved, good breast (pp. 61–3). The split in the object and the strong opposition of the emotions attached to it are consequences of the lack of integration or cohesion of the early ego. The ego splits the object into good and bad, splits the relation to the object, and so a split occurs within the ego itself. Good and bad objects, of which the external and internalized good breast and bad breast are the prototypes, are established in reality and phantasy, from gratifying and frustrating experiences. These experiences affect and are affected by phantasy: ‘Thus the picture of the object, external and internalized, is distorted in the infant’s mind by his phantasies, which are bound up with the projection of his impulses on to the object’ (p. 63). Therefore, a frustrating moment can lead the infant to attack the breast in phantasy and then perceive it as a vengeful internal and external persecutor.

The intensity of frustration and privation determines the intensity of greed and envy. Greed is an emotion primarily associated with introjection as its aim is to completely scoop out and devour the breast; envy has a projective aspect, as it not only aims to rob the breast of its goodness, but it also seeks to put badness into it. For Klein this destructive process means, in its deepest sen...