The Difficulty of Difference Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference and Film Theory
[Book]
D N Rodowick
Hoboken Taylor and Francis
2014
(177 p.).
Routledge Library Editions: Cinema
Description based upon print version of record
Preface 1. The Difficulty of Difference 2. The Return of the Exile 3. Reading Freud...Differently 4. Metamorphoses 5. The Difference of Reading 6. Analysis Interminable
This book argues that serious misreadings of Freud and Lacan on sexual difference have characterized prevailing models of psychoanalytic film criticism. In critiquing theories of identification and female spectatorship, the author maintains that early film theorists and feminist critics are equally guilty of imposing a binary conception of sexual difference on Freud's thought. By embracing such a rigid definition of male/female difference, they fail to understand the fundamentally complex and fluid process of sexual identification as it is articulated in Freud's writing, constructed in film te...