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This chapter analyzes psychoanalysis, ideology and the discourse of the species in Jonathan Demme's film The Silence of the Lambs. It suggests that cross-species identification for the character of Clarice Starling lies at the trauma for which the law of culture is felt to be compensatory. This chapter argues that Starling's relationship with Hannibal Lecter mobilizes and at the same time evacuates psychoanalytic discourse. It also discusses Jonathan Elmer's criticism on the film.

This chapter examines psychoanalytic discourse about masculine subjectivity—with an eye toward its gendered representations, and attention to the fissures and instabilities within these representations—to understand how it secures, and subverts, prevailing fantasies of masculine power and privilege. Psychoanalytic discourse, especially that of Freud and Lacan, seeks to establish a gendered order organized around wholeness and lack. Although such discourse frequently undoes itself in its articulation, usually containing the very materials that make critical intervention possible, the move toward an equation of maleness with plenitude and femaleness with incompletion is undeniable and has made psychoanalysis legitimately suspect in the eyes of many feminist critics. In considering these materials, the author draws upon the work of Kaja Silverman. In The Acoustic Mirror Silverman studies the anxieties “lack” creates within film theory and psychoanalysis. She notes that both discourses enable masculine subjects to overcome lack's attendant displeasures by displacing it onto female subjects and bodies.

This chapter examines the role of automata in psychoanalytic discourse by focusing on the problem of the Freudian uncanny. The accelerated advances in the technologies of animated pictures and automata have led many critics to return to Freud's original formulation. To grasp the full implications of automata for the understanding of the uncanny, it is necessary to reexamine the original point of contention between Freud and Ernst Jentsch and their contested readings. This work of reinterpretation aims to resituate the uncanny as the problem of the human–automata relationship, whereby the chapter clarifies the conceptual origins of the Freudian robot.

This chapter synthesizes a number of hypotheses centered around the invention of the superego (Über-Ich) and simultaneously upon the relation between psychoanalytic discourse and the problem of the political: not as a relation of application, a philosophical analogy, or simply of their mutual dependence on a common anthropology or theory of “culture,” but rather as a veritable reciprocity of perspectives, manifest in a recurring question that both fields recognize as their own. This reciprocity, the chapter argues, is manifestly evidenced in Freud's very introduction of the concept of the “superego,” which thus becomes the representative of the political at the heart of the theory of the unconscious just as it is or could be the representative of the unconscious psyche at the heart of political theory.