ABSTRACT
There is a moment in an article about Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner 1980) when Andrew Gordon notes that the film, “like all myths or fairy tales, deals with primal anxieties” (Gordon 1980: 315). Such anxieties, which relate to sexuality, can be psychoanalyzed within a number of frameworks. However, it is relatively rare for written sf, a modern form of myth, to be examined from these perspectives. This might be because early theorists of the genre were mostly working within Marxist or structuralist paradigms. In contrast, sf film has been frequently psychoanalyzed, in part because film studies has a strong tradition of using these approaches. This chapter will outline some of the major ideas within psychoanalysis, especially those of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and demonstrate applications of these analyses to sf.
