Psychoanalysis’ Viability as a Tool for New Media Rhetoric

The following paper was written for a New Media Analysis course Junior year.

In this essay, I will work through the fundamentals of psychoanalysis and consider its viability in relation to new media rhetoric. First, I will consider how post-Freudian psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan reinterpreted and convoluted the Freudian system to mesh with their own ideas. Then, I will consider how Laura Mulvey and James Snead harness psychoanalytic theory to forward their personal rhetoric about new media. Finally, I will discuss how the tripartite personality concept inherent to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory may be harnessed to think about new media, heeding particular attention to the theory’s relationship to social media platforms. 

Lacan’s Complexification of Freudian Psychoanalysis

In this section, I will briefly introduce two basic components of Freud's psychoanalytic theory and consider how Jacques Lacan expounds upon Freudian psychoanalytic theory and reimagines the developing psyche to bolster own ideas about the mirror stage. 

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, argued that the human psyche exists as a binaried structure wherein the unconscious and conscious mind exist both synergistically and oppositionally. The conscious mind represents reality, encompassing the thoughts humans may readily bring to the forefront of their awareness. The unconscious mind is a realm of subjective interiority that exists outside human awareness. Freud posited that neuroses and dreams are the manifestation of the unconscious, providing insight into the distorted thoughts, memories, desires, drives, repressions, instincts an individual is otherwise unable to access. He subdivided dream content into manifest content and latent content: the former being images or thoughts the dreaming subject recalls when they wake up, and the latter being the symbolic meaning behind the dreaming subject’s images and thoughts. The latter’s symbolic significance is predicated on the notion that images and thoughts produced by a dreaming subject are repressed products of their unconscious anxieties. Freud argued that––through talk therapy and dream analysis––patients may lure unconscious material into the conscious, thereby bringing the material into a realm where its latent content can be identified in behavioral habits, discussed, and potentially modified. 

Freud not only categorized the human psyche, but he also theorized a tripartite personality construct that corresponds to the binaried psyche. He uses a partially buoyant iceberg to represent human personality as both a submerged and observable manifestation of consciousness. The Id, or metaphorically submerged bottom of the iceberg, is the most primitive and unconscious dimension of personality. This dimension contains suppressed biological impulses, such as libido, and is both an inaccessible and unseen reality to the human subject. A newborn child operates solely based on the Id until they unearth the Ego and the Superego during developmental stages. The Ego, primarily represented by the superficial portion of the iceberg, is the Id as modified by the external world. In other words, the Ego encompasses one’s immediate awareness of self and projection of self to others, engaging in a constant tug of war with the impulsive, perhaps socially-unrealistic Id and the allegedly righteous pressures of society. Freud describes the Ego’s allegiance to the reality principle in order to explain its constant practice of compromising impractical drives and practical behaviors. The Superego, metaphorically represented both below and above the water’s surface, describes the systematized morality that one internalizes and attempts to fulfill. The Superego is, in theory, a personal ideal only realized when the Id is controlled and the Ego balanced. The Superego also deals with the Id’s manifestation in the real world, placing an emphasis on the Ego’s engagement with not only pragmatic behavior, but also ethical behavior. Freud theorized that the acquisition of the three personality facets corresponds with a subject’s psychosexual development. 

Freud applies the binaried psyche and the tripartite personality to his ideas about how humans account for desiring things lost at birth. One of his most famous ideas, the Oedipus Complex, exemplifies the tension between the Ego and the Id. Here, it is important to note that the Oedipus Complex, as well as the aforementioned categorizations, were only intended to apply to males, effectively excluding women from the confines of psychoanalytic theory. Let us suppose a young child desires to kill the parent that shares their gender identity. This desire is borne out of the Id’s impulsive, societally inappropriate tendencies. Here, the child’s Ego is aware of the reality of the situation. In a practical sense, the child recognizes the superior strength of their parents and knows their parents are necessary to their survival. Recognizing the impracticality of their Id-driven desire to kill, the child implicitly represses the desire and subsequently develops neuroses. A child’s neuroses might take the form of castration anxiety, or the fear that their father will castrate and emasculate them. Given that Freud’s psychoanalytic theory relies heavily on psychosexual development, castration would essentially curb a child’s entire developmental progress. Freud posits that, given the anxiety borne out of the tension between the Id’s desire to kill and the Ego’s acknowledgement of impracticality, the Oedipus Complex is resolved through object identification. That is, the child might develop an infatuation for the parent of the opposite sex, or even attempt to embody the hypermasculine threat itself. Once the child unsuccessfully grapples with the Oedipus Complex during the first five years, the unresolved tension between the Id and Ego begins to manifest itself in the aforementioned latency of dreams and neuroses.

Jacques Lacan, inspired by Freud, reinterpreted and complexified several of Freud’s controversial ideas, thereby contributing to the progress of psychoanalysis as a viable critical theory. In his essay, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” Lacan attempts to dismantle the cogito philosophy popularized by René Descartes. Furthermore, Lacan forwards a tripartite conception of the human psyche that, like Freud’s tripartite theory about personality, converges with a child’s psychosexual development. Lacan’s “Real” closely resembles Freud’s rhetoric about the Id. That is, the Real represents unbridled biological desire and an inaccessible reality. However, Lacan diverges from Freud’s Id in his Sauserian belief that the inaccesibility of the Real is a result of a child’s entrance into language. The Real cannot be expressed through language because a child’s development of language inherently and permanently separates them from the Real. Thus, in a Freudian manner, Lacan posits that the inability to satisfy the Real creates an insatiable tension that detrimentally influences one’s adult life. Lacan’s “Imaginary” facet of the psyche aligns with Freud’s Ego and describes the pre-linguistic phase in which a child psychicly engages with reality. The Imaginary concept indicates a child’s progression from having potentially satiable needs in the Real stages to having insatiable demands thereafter. Like the Ego’s tension with the Id, Lacan’s Imaginary order exists in tension with the Real. Lacan’s “Symbolic” order of the psyche corresponds with Freud’s Superego and embodies societal expectations and systems such as law and language. He posits that the Symbolic is not concerned with needs or demands, but rather desires that are inseparable from language. 

Lacan augments psychoanalytic theory with the notion of the mirror stage (a child’s discovery of their own image in a mirror), which corresponds to the Imaginary and occurs when a child is about 6-18 months old. Prior to the mirror stage, the child’s temporal existence is muddled by Freudian Id/Ego tensions and inseparable self/world conceptions. The child conceives of their own physical body in a fragmented manner before the mirror stage. However, once the child encounters his or her image in the mirror, they establish an imaginary relationship between self and self’s environment. Here, the child realizes that their body is not fragmented, but instead whole and distinct from the environment around them. However, the formative moment where a child realizes this un-fragmented physical body is nonetheless a mis-recognition. The sense of self gained through the mirror is not ‘self,’ but rather a perception of an external visual phenomenon (a physical reflection in a mirror). In other words, the child mis-recognizes the first reflection of their physical self as a discovery of a greater self, or Ego. The mirror’s reflection might present an un-fragmented and perhaps perfected physical form but, when internalized as an un-fragmented and perfected sense of self, tension arises. The child cannot live up to the perfection of self they internalized from their perception of a completed physical self. Thus, according to Lacan, a person’s actions throughout adulthood are malleated by this sense of lack or loss, oftentimes leading people to find emulatable role models to act in place of the mirror. Lacan expounded upon and revised aspects of Freud’s original psychoanalytic theory, contributing to psychoanalysis’ viability as a theoretical approach to explain issues beyond oneself.

Mulvey and Snead Apply Psychoanalysis to New Media

In this section, I will examine how Laura Mulvey and James Snead draw upon Freud’s foundations and Lacan’s extension of psychoanalytic theory to produce rhetoric about gender and race in film.

Mulvey harnessed psychoanalytic theory to pioneer her influential rhetoric about the male gaze. The male gaze theory draws upon psychoanalytical themes of mis-recognition and sexual pleasure, applying ideas of self and other to the allure of watching film. Mulvey, in considering the Lacanian mirror stage, compares the act of watching a film to the act of a baby looking into the mirror. Just as a baby mis-recognizes their completed physical image in the mirror as a perfected self, a spectator mis-recognizes the gaze of dominant male characters on a screen as their own gaze. The mis-recognition of self in the film is guided by both the film’s formal construction and the spectator’s orientation in a patriarchal society. For example, a spectator might watch a closeup shot of a male character’s eyes looking downwards and mouth smirking as he looks down at something. The next shot might be a female character’s lingerie stockings. The Kuleshov Effect explains how this association of images suggests that the male character takes erotic interest in the female character. According to Mulvey, a spectator in a patriarchal society is then formally guided to not only focalize with the male, but also take on the male’s gaze as their own gaze. That is, the spectator misrecognizes the male looking at the women’s lingerie as themselves and derives the same erotic pleasure at looking at the women as the male appears to derive. This misrecognition, in conjunction with gender’s construction as a system of power, insinuates that the power that the dominant male character exerts over the passive female character through an oppressive erotic gaze translates to the spectator’s similarly dominant subjection of the passive female to sexual disempowerment. Guided by film form and narrative, the viewer takes erotic pleasure in scopophilically looking into private moments between characters and takes empowering pleasure in mis-recognizing themself in dominant, active male characters. 

Mulvey does not use psychoanalysis to directly describe the reality of watching a film, but instead deploys psychoanalytic theory’s attention to masculinity, recognition of self, and visual/erotic pleasure to devise an independent feminist theory about film. She does not view psychoanalytic theory as a theory that can readily dismantle an entrenched patriarchal system because psychoanalysis itself is a tool bounded by patriarchal language. Instead, Mulvey uses psychoanalysis’ entanglement with gender and power to think about the patriarchy’s manifestation in film. She draws parallels between society’s patriarchal influence on film form and the subconscious mind’s manifestation in dreams, thereby situating film as a visible manifestation of its patriarchal underpinnings. Film’s erotic, patriarchal, and formal tendencies provide cinema with a sense of fantasy and satisfaction that, according to psychoanalytic theory, exist as two idealistic and perhaps unfilfillable ideals to the human subject. Film’s integration of fantasy and satisfaction in the form of the male gaze, to an extent, assuages the human viewer’s tensions with erotic drives and self, thereby codifying patriarchal power into a visual medium. However, Mulvey not only sees psychoanalysis as a tool for rhetorical deployment, but she also sees it as a means of arguing for political change. That is, she argues that the deployment of psychoanalysis as a means of thinking about gender in film can also inspire change in film production standards and shed light on avant-garde cinema’s tendency to work against formal expressions of the male gaze. 

While Mulvey talks about unconscious gendered conflicts in film, James Snead centers his argument around unconscious racial conflicts in Hollywood tradition, using the film King Kong as a vehicle of analysis. Snead argues that Black skin color is semiotically constructed and encoded on screen, encouraging the white male viewer to receive an easily digestible, binaried message of white superiority and black inferiority. King Kong was produced during a time where Black males were often likened to ape-like animals, suggesting that the animal protagonist in the film represents a Black male stereotype. In linking King Kong to a Black man, the film stereotypically fastens Blackness to the aggressive, threatening characteristics embodied by the monkey. Yet, Snead’s argument does not merely deal with structural racism’s embodiment in stereotypical film characters, going further to dissect why such visual representations are repeatedly constructed for and continuously appeal to spectators. He considers how racial Othering contributes to a self-projection of identity. That is, how the dominant “I” necessitates the “Other” to exist as an “I” in the first place. In the case of Blackness in cinema, the male character’s inherent dominance is a self-projection based on the subjugation of Black skin color to an opposing “Other”. Whiteness is only considered whiteness in opposition; it necessitates Blackness’ Othered existence as “not White” to exist itself. Black is what is not white. In a manner of visual colonization, the white character is only dominant if the Black character is disempowered. Once reproduced time and time again as narrative stereotypes, this construction of race becomes a model for the viewer’s thoughts and actions. 

Snead aligns with Mulvey’s belief that film’s formal arrangement of gazes and shots guides the way a spectator views a given film. However, he diverges from Mulvey’s idea that the spectator’s identification always lies with the powerful male in her argument about the male gaze. Instead, Snead argues that, given each spectator’s distinct identity and position in society, the spectator might actually end up identifying with the filmmaker in movies, like King Kong. However, over time and through formal coding strategies, the viewer ultimately resonates with Denham, the controller of the film’s sexual and racial gaze. Snead, like Mulvey, argues that film ultimately provides a socially-acceptable means of satisfying otherwise repressed, oppressive thought patterns. This argument may be likened to the Ego’s mediation of the Id. A viewer may hold violent racist beliefs that, according to a societal and moral standard, cannot be expressed or acted upon. The Ego mediates the Id’s impulsive beliefs, channeling them into more socially-acceptable outward expressions. Film, then, functions in a manner similar to the Ego. Films like King Kong provide the spectator with a seemingly covert means of indulging in the violent or racist thought patterns held in the Id. In codifying Blackness into the film through form and characterization, films like King Kong provide a “socially-acceptable” means of indulging spectators’ repressed racist tendencies.  

Personal Application of Freudian Psychoanalysis to New Media

In considering the ways that Mulvey and Snead deploy psychoanalytic theory to produce their unique arguments about gender and race, I began to consider how I might also harness psychoanalytic theory to reflect on my personal experience with new media. In this section, I will reflect on how Freud’s theoretical constructions of the Id, Superego, and Ego might be considered in tandem with ideas of social media representation.

The Snapchat ‘private story’ feature offers users a means of curating a space where viewership is mediated. That is, if I have my mother and father as friends on the app, I can create a private story that excludes them from seeing my content. Apps like BeReal, initially constructed to encourage less polished content, seem to eventually stray from their initially ‘authentic’ value proposition. For example, BeReal users in my personal life have increasingly started to admit to waiting until they are doing something ‘fun’ or waiting until they are with friends to post what is supposed to be in-the-moment content. The emergence of “Finstas,” or fake Instagram accounts to post unedited, personal content followed a similar trajectory, transforming into an hyper-curated space dissolved by its own development. However, Snapchat’s private story function has remained allegiant to its original proposition in providing users a space to post unpolished content to a low-stakes, close-friend audience. Users looking to post about underage drinking or hot political takes no longer use the main story function as a place to showcase controversial content, but instead turn to the private story function. In a sense, the private story is a safe place for the expression of the Id, albeit the Id’s theoretical definition supposedly prevents it from being expressed in its purest form. Yet, in a biological sense, the Id demands instantaneous gratification, which arguably may be fulfilled by the private story’s oftentimes rapid evocation of positive reactions. That is, the group of selected individuals on one’s private story are typically close companions, which arguably encourages a higher percentage of engagement. If I post a private story of myself at a restaurant, it is not uncommon for several friends to “slide up” and ask where I am or provide some other form of commentary. Perhaps this response rate, when considered in relation to the proven dopamine rushes one receives from rewarding social stimuli like Instagram likes, provides the Id with the instant gratification it requires. 

If the Id can be considered in relation to private Snapchat stories, then the Ego, under this running theory, may be likened to a platform like Instagram. The Ego, developing out of the Id, channels the Id’s impulses so that they are outwardly expressed in a socially-acceptable manner. Instagram offers users the chance to post photos of family, friends, art, travel, schooling, and essentially every other dimension of one’s personal experience in the world. While the platform used to be a more spur-of-the-moment platform to post instantaneous images, the emergence of everyday editing applications have transformed Instagram into an increasingly mediated space. To illustrate the Ego’s function in relation to a platform like Instagram, I will use an example. Let us suppose a user has a deep-seated anxiety about their weight or appearance (unbeknownst to them via therapy, etc.) and they post a photo of themselves in a bikini with the all-too-common caption “might delete later,” perhaps tacking a cheeky emoji at the end. Here, the rooted, unbenknownst anxiety resembles the unconscious Id. Instead of acting on the Id’s impulsive tendencies by posting a caption like “I look fat” or “I hate myself,” the user’s Ego channels the anxious Id into a socially acceptable outward manifestation. The post itself, which is arguably intended to procure positive commentary, exists as a socially-acceptable means of projecting the user’s insecurity. This example aligns with the Ego’s link to the reality principle. The reality principle resembles a cost/benefit analysis in which the psyche determines how to channel an Id-residing thought (I hate myself) into a socially-palatable Ego expression (bikini photo with a less self-destructive caption). 

According to Freud, the Superego contains the internalized moral standards that an individual gleans from parental influence and society. I would argue that the practice of posting on platforms like LinkedIn most closely adheres to the ideas associated with the Superego. If each component of Freud’s tripartite psyche were ranked in terms of level of mediation, the Superego is the most mediated. It resembles a perfected moral standard that we seek to achieve and exists in constant tension with the impulsive Id and realistic Ego. LinkedIn is a professional platform in which users attempt to showcase their “best self.” Private story posts of underage drinking might be frowned upon on platforms like Instagram, but they would be aggressively scrutinized on a platform like LinkedIn. LinkedIn implicitly requires users to achieve a certain standard of perfectionism and professionalism in their content. The platform’s implicit standards, in conjunction with affiliate users’ fulfillment of such implicit standards, encourages an individual to follow suit, adhere to the professional standard, and construct an image of themselves as good-natured, hardworking, ethically-sound individual. LinkedIn essentially invites its users to subdue their impulsive Id, polish their outward Ego, and activate their Superego to construct an online identity that adheres to the moral and professional standards set by other users and society at large.

Perhaps the linkage of Freudian tripartite theory and social media platforms is a product of pre-existing, unspoken rules attached to distinct platforms and mechanisms. We understand that we can post X content on a private story but cannot post X content on LinkedIn. Similarly, we acknowledge that Y content would not be exciting on a private story, but the same Y content fits perfectly with the identity that LinkedIn demands. While my discussion centered around how the tri-part personality guides our distinct online personas, it is more likely that the implicit expectations set by the platforms are the activators themselves. In other words, we internalize the unspoken rules inherent to each distinct social media platform and subsequently produce an outward expression of self that best suits the platforms’ implicit expectations. In this sense, social media platforms seem to function like microcosmic societies wherein each platform has its own set of users, standards, moral codes, rules, and expectations that the conscious mind must internalize to revise and present an acceptable outward manifestation of the Id. Mulvey and Snead build upon Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalytic theory to describe film viewership as a means of indulging our socially-unacceptable, repressed desires. In doing so, they effectively demonstrate that psychoanalysis, despite being an antiquated and controversial theory, is rhetorically malleable and may be deployed to produce original arguments about new media. If this is true, then perhaps psychoanalysis can be harnessed to produce original arguments about social media platforms’ relationship to Freudian scholarship about the human psyche.

References

Lacan, J. (2014). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function . Reading French Psychoanalysis, 97–104. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315787374-6

Laura Mulvey: Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. (2002). The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance, 296–301. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203143926-60

Snead, J. (1991). Spectatorship and capture in King Kong: the guilty look. Critical Quarterly, 33(1), 53–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8705.1991.tb00929.x