As a film with psychotherapy as its narrative subject, Mind Catcher is suitable as a medium to connect the esoteric psychological model of mind with a popular plot. Throughout the whole film, its core theoretical basis is the psychotherapy of humanistic psychology, and the film should be analyzed based on the psychological operation mechanism advocated by humanistic psychology or existential psychology. However, if we ignore the theoretical basis on which the creators of the film rely, from the perspective of textual analysis alone, the most appropriate theory is of course psychoanalysis, which has an unparalleled influence in the field of literary analysis. Therefore, this article will try to understand the spiritual secret of Will Hunter, the protagonist in the film, from the perspective of psychoanalysis.
1. Backtracking from the end
In the film's climax, Will, guided by psychologist Thorn, shares his most traumatic childhood memories: his first adoptive father was a lover of domestic violence. Traumatic childhood experiences related to sexuality are the most "favorite" of the psychoanalytic school. In Freud's analysis of dreams (and also his analysis of unconscious desires), he pointed out the important influence of childhood experiences on the later subjective desires. From this, Will suffered domestic violence as a child, which made him have a strong resistance to establishing a symbolic relationship. In the structure of his unconscious, "long-term symbolic relationships" runs counter to the pleasure principle and thus forms a kind of paranoid connection with negative emotions - whenever someone throws "long-term relationships" at Will An olive branch, Will will be indiscriminately delusional that the establishment of this relationship will have consequences. Take the scene where he leaves Skyler angrily, when Skyler proposes that Will go to California with her (a request that is tantamount to a marriage proposal), a series of delusional scenes where Skyler will soon abandon himself. Will spews out: you're just looking for a poor kid to play, you're just looking for something to talk about at a high-society party later, as if Will had just finished watching a conspiracy theory version of the Titanic (where Ross and I. Jack didn't die, but Rose got tired of playing after going ashore and dumped Jack).
It's worth noting that Will doesn't necessarily have a conflict with the person he's just dealing with, but rather a very comfortable, pre-Oedipus lip or anal pleasure relationship between Will and this person, only if these people If he tries to establish a long-term symbolic relationship with him, Will will turn his face immediately, even hurting each other in the most ruthless way to cut off this "dangerous relationship". The general structure of the film can provide evidence: when Will and Rambo and Skyler first established their relationship, there was no important symbolic agreement between them, and their activities were completely pre-symbols of "no shame" Humiliating pleasures, such as embarrassing other mathematicians during a math discussion, or licking a leaf on each other's teeth while kissing Skyler; soon Skyler "suddenly" lets Will run off with her, Rambo Will's relationship with them collapses when the professor "suddenly" offers Will a job. In contrast, the only long enough relationship in the story - in the friendship between Will and Chu Qi and others, they have been pursuing the pleasure of the former symbol humiliation - there is no oath between them, only clubbing, playing ball, fighting , telling dirty jokes, humiliating top students...
So, in the climax of the final treatment, how should the slightly hypocritical and repeated "it's not your fault" be understood from a psychoanalytic point of view? According to Lacan's early understanding of symptoms (symptoms are a forced connection between two signifiers, one of which is repressed, and thus the truth of desire is encrypted), the logic for healing symptoms here is: Repeat, the doctor persuaded Will's unconscious to sever the forced connection between the "symbolic relationship" and "bad things can happen", and the truth of desire - the long-term love relationship with Skyler, was able to show its true colors. . However, this understanding is not entirely convincing: what if Skyler didn't show up? What will the truth of Will's desire be?
2. From symptom to symptom
The central driver of the story's progression, Will's dramatic conflict with the therapist, Rambo, and Skyler, stems from Will's symptoms. Therefore, in order to better interpret Will's desires in the film, the first thing to do is to re-understand Will's symptoms. An obvious move would be to reinterpret Will's symptoms in the same way that Lacan understood them in his later years. In order not to cause confusion, here follows the practice of some well-known psychoanalysts, changing the late Lacan's term for symptoms to symptoms. According to Lacan in the later period, the symptom and the subject have a very dialectical relationship, which is a kind of giving the subject the unity of existence, so that the subject can construct a constitutive relationship between the symptom and the enjoyment, and the symptom is also the foundation of the subject. The relationship between symptoms and pleasure is like the relationship between a wound and scratching a rotten wound. The pleasure here is a kind of pleasure beyond pleasure, the point where pleasure turns into pain, expressing a kind of satisfaction obtained from scratching a rotten wound. Symptoms are such wounds, a pathological signification that constitutes a binding to pleasure, an inert flaw that resists communication and interpretation, a flaw that cannot be included in the cycle of discourse, the cycle of social cohesion, but becomes its existence. . At the same time, this wound imparts pleasure to the subject.
From symptom to symptom, the most obvious benefit is that Will's cry in Sonn's arms can be easily understood: Isn't this a kind of "pain and joy" pleasure? And doesn't Will's trip to California at the end of the film to find Skyler echoes Lacan's dictum that a woman is a symptom (or symptom) of a man? However, under the guise of the euphoric results of a renewed understanding of symptoms lurks a bomb that can devastate earlier discussions: When did Skyler's symptoms as Will emerge? No matter how you analyze it, it ultimately leads to a puzzling conclusion: Will was asymptomatic until he experienced what happened in the story, even until the last moment of therapy.
It should be noted that the absence of symptoms does not mean that Will is normal. On the contrary, it is precisely because there are no symptoms that Will is abnormal. Understanding this seemingly paradoxical statement requires an argument from the paradox of the very concept of "normal" itself. According to the law of the unity of opposites in dialectics, anything can only be defined in its opposite, and so is "normal", which can only be defined in "abnormal". To put it simply, normality is just a kind of vision that humans use to divide the world from their own perspective, dividing the chaos and violence before the division into normal and abnormal. Therefore, normality is never something transcendental, but merely as something that fits the vision of the majority or authority. In this sense, Will's "abnormality" is just inconsistent with the audience's perception and mainstream values-he doesn't run away with his girlfriend in love, waste his talents, and only promotes "love should be together" , don't bury your talent" in the morbid world in the Kantian sense, it appears abnormal.
So why on earth is Will not acting as normal as mainstream cognition demands? The reason, of course, has to go back to Will's troubled childhood to find out. Due to domestic violence, Will failed to identify with his adoptive father well when he was a child, which shows that Will failed to spend his sexual characteristics well and failed to form a good Oedipus complex. Therefore, the essence of Will's experience in the film's story is the process in which he forms the Oedipus complex and constructs symptoms, pleasures and desires.
3. From Mother's Desire to Father's Name
In order to better find the formation process of the Oedipus complex from the structure of the film, it is meaningful to briefly review the Oedipus complex and the signifier of Phoebus.
In Freud's eyes, the focus of the Oedipus complex lies in the young boy's balancing of the contradictory feelings towards his parents, from the process of attaching to his mother and hating his father to repressing the Oedipus's obedience to his father. The Oedipus complex in Lacan's eyes is different from Freud's, and the Oedipus complex should first be a symbolic structure. Humans are in the complex symbolic structure of society, and the initial social structure they face is the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex thus prescribes the original structure of symbolic and unconscious relations.
Freud's phallus is equivalent to a penis, while Lacan's phallus is a signifier as absence and gender difference. First of all, it is necessary to distinguish two different kinds of phallus—imaginary phallus and symbolic phallus (detailed discussion needs to introduce Lacan’s concept of three domains), the former refers to the desire of the mother imagined by the child Object, only the father owns. Children can only accept that they have a phallus on a symbolic level only when they realize that this phallus is imaginary and that they can never have it. As a result, the dualistic relationship between mother and child is broken, the father's name replaces the mother's desire, and the child becomes the missing subject. Lacan calls this process symbolization. The phallus is the central signifier that organizes in the unconscious, and it is also the original object of loss, the missing signifier.
The process of symbolizing the separation of the child from the mother is the key to the formation of the child's desire. The idea of separation from the mother is embodied in the child wanting to know what exists outside the mother-child relationship and beyond the mother. The child realizes that he is not all the object of his mother's desire, and asks: what does she want from me? What am I to her? What does she want? And realize that both myself and my mother are subjects of desire for something missing. According to Lacan, desire is the surplus of demand minus need, and the presence of this surplus is the sign of completion of symbolization.
The above narrative about the Oedipus complex corresponds well with the structure of the film. In the discussion in the first part of this article, it was already stated that when Will had just established the relationship with Rambo/Skyler, there was a pure binary relationship between them, and there was no dissatisfaction between them. Later in the episode, when Skyler and Rambo's demands go beyond Will - asking Will to elope/find a job, Will's strong reaction marks the impact of his childhood experience: he can't honor his father's name, Therefore, its prelude, the desire of motherhood, cannot be accepted here. Their relationship ends when the mother's desire arises, which is when Rambo and Skyler demand more of Will than the current Will. Just because Will's personality development stayed in the sexual characteristic period, Will never formed an Oedipus complex, so he never gave up the imaginary phallus, and Will would not have dissatisfaction and no desire. Furthermore, there are no symptoms.
Will can't live without a completely self-contained binary relationship, and after Skyler and Rambo fall out, he can still maintain a mother-son binary-like relationship with Chucky (not that they're gay, but the emphasis is on the two.) the self-sufficient nature of the relationship between them). It's also an important starting point for Will's final transformation: the moment he's really forced to confront his mother's desires is when he chats with Chucky, who wants him to fly away. Chucky's demands go beyond Will himself, and Will can't find a second Chucky to continue a mother-son relationship. Now, Will is finally ready to complete the final subjectification.
4. From "It's not your fault" to "You can't make mistakes"
Next, the key to the completion of Will's subjectivation lies in giving up the imaginary Phallus. This "castration" is, of course, Dr. Sonn and his repeated words: "It's not your fault." Here, I can’t help but understand the deep meaning of this sentence in a completely different way: this is not just a comforting sentence full of understanding and humane care, but also a sentence with the majesty and lofty attitude of a father, forcing Will to admit All the results were beyond his control, so he gave up his all-powerful imagination about his "wenneng mocking the professor, martial arts mad bully", and agreed that he had no Phileas. Will's desire is also established from this: Before that, Will's logic about breaking up with Skyler was: although I broke up with her, it was my free will choice; after the castration happened, Will's The thought became: Since it's not all my fault, it's all the fault of my childhood trauma, why should I break up with her? The fact that Skyler is not his own constitutes Will's lack, making him the subject of desire. Here, Skyler is his symptom.
Apparently, Sonn shoulders the burden of his father's name to a certain extent. In fact, the development of his relationship with Will is not difficult to see the quality of both parents. Here, just to illustrate this point with a less formal example: at the end of the film, Will leaves a message for Sann, and Sann quipped: "Learn me, you brat." Besides humor, this kind of Dealing with one of the insights reminiscent of psychoanalysis: our parents were the first to introduce us into the realm of language, and we are bound to express our desires in language.
From the perspective of psychoanalysis, this paper interprets the psychological problems and development process of the character Will of the Mind Catcher. Due to the length and the knowledge level of the author, the views in the article are inevitably insufficient and inappropriate. In addition, the film has many characters, dense lines, and complicated stories, and there are too many places to analyze, but this article only analyzes its most basic structure.
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