The methodological basis behind Mulvey's essay is psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic theory, which seeks to understand the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. The discipline was created by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud at the beginning of the twentieth century, and expanded on by French psychologist Jacques Lacan. Mulvey draws on the work of both Freud and Lacan throughout her essay, showing how unconscious fears and desires manifest in the way films are created and viewed. Mulvey's application of psychoanalytic theory to popular cinema is just one example of how psychoanalysis has intersected with the art world. Indeed, psychoanalysis has also been used to analyze literature and visual art, including works produced long before the twentieth century.
While psychoanalysis is a complex discipline, there are a handful of major tenets to which Mulvey alludes throughout her essay. The first is scopophilia, or the pleasure derived from looking. Mulvey, like Freud, associates scopophilia with the more erotic phenomenon of voyeurism, in which a viewer derives pleasure from looking at a subject that is unaware they are being watched. Mulvey connects this concept of pleasure through looking to the experience of film-going for modern audiences.
Another tenet of psychoanalysis on which Mulvey relies is the concept of the ego and the Lacanian mirror stage. Here, Mulvey refers to Freud's description of the ego as that which establishes one's sense of self, and to Lacan's example of a child recognizing themself in the mirror as a separate identity from their parents. This ego, Mulvey argues, is what lures movie watches into identifying with the male protagonist on screen, as he becomes the perfected and projected version of the self.
Finally, Mulvey borrows from psychoanalysis the concept of the castration complex. This term denotes the anxiety produced in males by the fact that women are without a phallus—women come to represent, on an unconscious level, the threat of castration. For Mulvey, this complex figures into popular film in that women become objectified by the camera and alienated by plot in order to mitigate the latent threat they pose to male protagonists and male spectators. As such, Mulvey suggests that the Freudian castration complex is what turns women in film into fetishized objects rather than whole characters with individual agency.
