Lacan Psychoanalysis

 Lacan's ideas around psychoanalysis are based around his idea of need. He uses an idea of humans lacking something to explain our constant endeavour to find something that fulfils us, in the same way that Freud had imagined the Id. He explains in a greater detail that a person can be both deprived of recieving  things as a child which would make them more eager to find a way to get it but through a less demanding method. He says that this occurs as children when we are given things by our parents or not given them. Those who got a lot from there parents would be spoiled resulting in a more demanding person as they get older as they think they can get anything by yelling loud enough, the other side is those were given not much are more driven to find ways around demanding for what they want, in my eyes this can mean both good and bad.

The mirror stage is an idea that Lacan creates where he highlights the first time a child sees them self in a mirror, he says that it is the first point where a human sees themselves not from the inside and from their mind but what they actually look like. He says that we are never going to be happy with this idea of what we look like on the outside and as such this is why we pursue fashion or take an interest in our outside body. He also said that a lot of the time the outside body does not reflect what is happening in the head this means that we grow frustrated when we have a hard time communicating strong feelings to another person.

The Movie Enemy suits Lacan's lack theory and mirror stage quite well since the movie is literally about seeing an opposite version of yourself. In enemy there is a professor who has quite a boring life and for the first quarter of the films makes it quite clear he isn't really enjoying his life or his job. He starts watching films and ends up seeing someone who looks like him in a movie, he searches for the guy and ends up finding him. After some time the professor sets up a meeting with the actor and they realise they are almost exactly the same however now the professor doesn't really want anything to do with the actor. He believes the actor to have a superior life to his and doesn't want to be replaced. The idea of seeing himself causes him to become uneasy as like in Lacan's theory the image looking back at us doesn't feel like us. Enemy takes this one step further by personifying the mirrored image.