Castration Anxiety And Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, a sequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre released in 1974, is a 1986 film directed by Tobe Hooper. This sequel is set 13 years after the events that transpired in the first film and follows Lieutenant "Lefty" Enright, played by Dennis Hopper, on his quest to find and destroy the Sawyer family the Sawyer clan did to his niece, Sally Hardesty, and his nephew, Franklin, in the first film of the franchise. Historically, "horror films developed out of the tradition of Gothic novels from Europe by way of Mary Shelley or Bram Stoker" (Dirks 788). Like these Gothic novels, horror cinema highlights the battle between good and evil whether it is between two separate individuals or entities, or a battle within the self. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2's narrative and description of the fight between good and evil allows for the analysis of theories such as isolation, exploration, transformation, and metamorphosis.

Child molestation and sexual assault is an ever growing problem in the United States today, but an even bigger problem is that these pedophiles are being released after only serving as little as one quarter of their sentence. In California alone (at the time the bill was first passed), there was an estimated 680 individuals on parole for molestation and other sexual assaults including sodomy by force with a victim under the age of thirteen as well as child molestation with foreign objects.

Nonetheless, the disclosure that surrounds the rape of the woman does not break away from the customary views on violence especially towards women. In the entire movie, women are depicted and viewed as extremely traditional and passive. They are supposed to follow whatever is required from them. Gender through the movie exists in the similar way through which race exists. The society in the movie is largely patriarchy, and gender is unconsciously used for the purpose of justifying oppression and patriarchal

The principal idea in Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of The Uncanny theory centres around the Heimlich, translating to ‘homely’ and thus, what is familiar, and the Unheimlich, which is often translated to what is ‘Uncanny’ defined as ‘what is […] frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar’ (Freud, 1919) or later described as something that is ‘secretly familiar which has undergone repression’. He extends the theory further by placing the uncanny in to two classes, those are, thoughts that have been ‘surmounted’, for example, superstitious beliefs that have been discarded but re-emerge when an event occurs that could potentially confirm these beliefs. The second class being that of the ‘repressed complexes’ such as recalling repressed trauma, most specifically from childhood, fear, and unconscious desires.

In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey uses the motif of castration to show that women have the power to emasculate even the most masculine of men, displaying the issues with extreme sexism.

Prepare yourself for a journey. Travel with me, as we explore the mind of a character named Roy played by Edward Norton in the film directed by Gregory Hoblit in 1996 Titled “Primal Fear”. In this film Roy suffers from a psychological disorder. As we travel on this journey deep into the mind of this character, we will begin to unlock the secrets that lay within. Discovering what psychological disorder Roy suffers from, how he thinks and his thought process from a bio-psychological perspective, and treatments for this disorder using cognitive behavior therapy. “Primal Fear” is the story of a young man who is accused of the murder of an archbishop. With all the evidence pointing towards him as the target suspect, an ambitious and vagarious

In a crescendo of pain, devastation and hysteria, the girl mentions her terror in reliving the rape when going through the justice system. Juxtaposed with the "jaws rasp[ing] on the naked bone", the questioning is yet another violation

The concept of the uncanny can be a difficult one to comprehend; this is why Freud begins his essay with an analysis of the different definitions of the uncanny in various languages. Ultimately Freud rests that the German terms “heimlich” and “unheimlich” best match the definition of the uncanny because it is translated as familiar and unfamiliar. The uncanny can be defined as something that creates a feeling of familiarity but also unfamiliarity, and this unfamiliarity is what is fearful to the individual. Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” can be related to the field of literary criticism because he explains how the feeling of the uncanny relates to the author’s attempt to convey a certain response from their audience. This type of analysis

Toni Morrison describes Pauline losing her tooth after Pauline and Cholly moved to Ohio. What starts off as a small brown speck grows and “cut into the surface…finally eating away to the root…then the weakened roots, having grown accustomed to the poison, responded one day to severe pressure, and the tooth fell free, leaving a ragged stump behind” (Morrison 116). Morrison chooses to use “poison” to describe what causes Pauline’s tooth to decay and fall out, and the pernicious word conveys the pain of the body betraying its own member. Losing teeth is a common occurrence, and in life’s younger years it is even often an exciting occasion. But when an adult tooth falls out, especially when the body rejects the corrupted tooth, the situation is considerably different.

Bromden’s mother is also a significant example of this, with the Chief explaining how his once proud and “real big” father was reduced to a suffering alcoholic because his mother made him “too little to fight anymore”. The suggestion that women are presented as castrators is also noteworthy, as throughout the novel both McMurphy and Bromden make references. When Rawler castrates himself, the Chief observes that “all he had to do was wait”, implying that the institution and the women running it would have castrated him in the long run. This can be related to the Freudian theory of ‘Penis Envy’, in the sense that because Ratched and other female oppressors lack the manhood usually associated with men, they must exert their dominance in other ways. The fact that the hospital, run by women, treats only men is a further example of the matriarchal society that Kesey creates within the novel. Perhaps the most obvious reference to castration is when Nurse Ratched suggests an “operation” for McMurphy. Of course, she is referring to a lobotomy, but it could be interpreted as another “besides, it wouldn’t be any use to lop ‘em off. I got another pair in my nightstand”. Both procedures remove a man’s distinctiveness, liberty and ability for sexual expression. In this sense the operations are symbolically the same. The general consensus seems to agree with Harding, who complains, “We are victims of a matriarchy here.”

Sex offenders are people who have been charged and convicted of or pled guilty of a sex crime. Sexual offenders are not all the same, rather each case in different and unique. A sex offender's crime can range from gaining access to underage pornographic material to rape and even just kidnapping a child. Nonetheless the acts committed by sex offenders are morally wrong and continues to occur in the United States.

Freud continued his work on repression, memories, and past experiences of trauma to be the motive for all neurotic symptoms. Trauma in past experiences was not always the key determinant for hysteria cases, there needed to be another component for the cause. The combination of past trauma and present trauma awakened memories of the earlier trauma which constituted the true aggravation (Storr, 1989, p. 15). However, he began to see a common factor in his work. Next Freud noticed that a common denominator of all his hysteria cases was premature sexual experiences. Sex encompasses many emotions through mind, body, and spirit that can influence a great deal of character if repressed. Storr pointed out that, “Freud became more and more convinced that the chief

Cathy Caruth’s “Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Trauma” claims that “to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (Caruth 3). This idea of possession is seen in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ulalume” through the narrator’s enigmatic journey toward his dead lover’s grave. Throughout the poem, the narrator unknowingly works to overcome the trauma that is associated with “surviving” the event of his lover dying. The narrator is seemingly able to understand the true cause of his trauma through the use of the paradoxical duality of attraction/repulsion and familiar/unfamiliar contained in the “Uncanny” as described by Sigmund Freud in “The Uncanny.” The narrator uses the information gained from his trance-like walk to realize his

in this stage where girls develop “penis envy”, the solution is to obtain the father’s penis (sexual desire) through identifying with the mother and mimicking her in order to replace her. Emily fails to resolve the conflict in the phallic stage because she was unable to identify with the same-sex parent. We can only hypothesize that the mother may have abandoned her or died during this time so that there was no same-sex parent to identify with. Failure to identify with the mother led to the failure of successfully obtaining the penis, and the failure to understand through psychosexual competition with the mother for the father, that all women do not and cannot possess a penis. Emily then begets a nonnegotiable necessity to have a phallic figure around in her life, and if she can’t, a possession of the “penis” herself. Emily’s submissiveness to letting her father control her romantic life can be interpreted as the need to have her father’s phallic figure around but when her father died, the phallic figure was “castrated” from her. The realization of the temporality of this kind of possession may have triggered the need to permanently have control over the possession of the penis in the form of a phallic figure. This may explain the poisoning of Homer, a “big, dark, ready man, with a big voice”, in the ultimate attempt to obtain the “penis” and finally, however perversely, resolve the penis envy. Emily herself is transformed—and tragically— into somewhat of a

According to Freud, there are three kinds of anxiety – reality, moral and neurotic. Reality anxiety is experienced when there is an actual danger coming from the external world. Moral anxiety arises when there is a conflict between one’s behavior and what the superego is demanding one to do. Finally, neurotic anxiety is felt when the ego feels incapable of controlling the id and the urges hiding in it. The tools people use to get rid of anxiety is what psychoanalysts call “Defense Mechanisms” (Schultz and Schultz, 2009). Defense mechanisms are different behavioral patterns, some of them are considered mature (for example humor) and some immature but what is important for this paper is that in psychoanalytic therapy, defense mechanisms are identified and the goal of the therapy is to overcome them and access the unconscious conflicts which are according to the Freudians the root of any mental problem. Moreover, all problems’ origin can be found in childhood - most often in a faulty relationship with one of the primary caregivers (Hough,