ABSTRACT
This chapter explores psychoanalysis as a method of reading texts and practices. It explains how psychoanalysis understands human behaviour, this will be done only as it can be extended to cultural analysis in cultural studies. Perhaps much more fundamental to psychoanalysis, the psyche is envisaged as a site of perpetual conflict. Sigmund Freud’s final model of the psyche introduces three new terms: the ego, the super-ego and the id. Jacques Lacan takes Freud’s developmental structure and re-articulates it through a critical reading of structuralism to produce a post-structuralist psychoanalysis. Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ is perhaps the classic statement on popular film from the perspective of feminist psychoanalysis. Terry Eagleton describes the Slovenian critic Slavoj Zizek as the most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in Europe for some decades.
