ABSTRACT
It could be argued that psychoanalysis, in its various incarnations, has kept the body at the centre of its theories. From Freud’s work on the unconscious and the formation of the ego to Lacan’s thinking about the acquisition of language or the mirror phase, the body – as constitutive of the speaking subject, in its role within the realm of the symbolic – has been significant to its major thinkers, albeit sometimes only obliquely.1 However, because psychoanalysis is invested in totemic understandings of, for example, psychosexual development and is often connected to abstract notions related to the mind or to social-organisational principles, it has been perceived as an “acorporeal” critical approach within the context of Cultural and, more specifically, Film Studies. Whilst it was, at one point, the favoured methodology in the Humanities, recent work has, unsurprisingly, aimed to recuperate it.2 Whilst psychoanalysis, as a discipline, continues to be used and studied, there has been a major drive towards the application of poststructuralist theories that celebrate plurality and the significance of the specificity of the individual to the analysis of cultural texts. Among these, the work of Deleuze and Guattari, especially their powerful challenge to Freud in Anti-Oedipus (1977), has contributed to the perception of psychoanalysis as potentially outdated and even ahistorical.3 Although this has naturally translated into Horror Studies, with recent publications unpacking the benefits of alternative approaches like phenomenology, critics in the field still borrow from psychoanalysis.4
