The Dream Factory Analysis

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The dream factory: a psychoanalytic reading of cinema: Irrational Man

The cinema is often reared to as the dream factory, because of the fact that the onscreen representation often displays our dreams back to us. Whether this is through our desires or most absurd fantasies. Psychoanalytic theory then helps us to better understand these representations by exploring the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the practice of art. In specific the dream factory, or in other words a psychoanalytic reading of cinema. By referencing psychoanalytic theorists such as Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, I hope to reach a deeper understanding of psychoanalysis. To do so I will be analysing the film Irrational Man 2015, written and directed by Woody Allen.

Psychoanalysis can be defined as the study of the human mind. By asking what is the human mind, psychoanalysis has “radically reshaped the way we understand not only subjectivity but sexuality, and the subjectified production of meaning through word and image”. (Pollock, 2008). Psychoanalysis today then has three aspects in which it can be viewed. Firstly it is a method of investigation, secondly it is a therapeutic technique, and lastly it also functions as a body of scientific and theoretical knowledge. (Sadock 2015: 237). Psychoanalysis has “come to be the method for interpreting what lies visible and non-visible inside content” (). Freud called this 'the psychopathology of everyday life’(). and was one of the most