Among the theories of literary criticism, psychoanalytic criticism is one of the most interesting and complicated methods. It can be used for analysing the artwork to both decipher the message of the author and investigate the way the audience perceives this message. In this paper, the film The Wall (1982) by Alan Parker, based on the album of the English rock band Pink Floyd (1979), will be analysed through the prism of psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalytic criticism is built on the key concepts of psychoanalysis founded by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud’s main idea was about a “split at the centre of the psyche between consciousness of self and that which is unconscious” (Elliott 9). The individual in psychoanalysis is regarded as lacking an essential unity of the self, being divided between the id (strong instinctive desires), the ego (conscious rationality), and the superego (social expectations) (Evans 46). In psychoanalysis, “psychic reality is the most important kind of reality” (Evans 47), and experience of the world is treated as the result of the filtering of the mind. In the explanation of human behaviour, sexual motifs play a crucial role.
In The Wall by Pink Floyd, the aforementioned traits can be found. The main character of the film, in many ways reflecting its main creator, a member of the band Roger Waters, experiences total disharmony and separation from the world. The norms of society stop him from the free expression of his nature (see, for example, the episode in the school). He sees his mother with her protective love and care as something that makes him impotent and dependent, and later this feeling is expressed in regard to his wife. This detail straightly refers to Freud’s Oedipus complex, “one of the most painful psychical achievements of the pubertal period… detachment from parental authority” (Castle 165). The world of the main hero appears as the bizarre intertwining of reality and imagination, which resembles the method of deciphering dreams in psychoanalysis.
In summary, the authors of the film The Wall seem to use many of the ideas of psychoanalysis. Therefore, the appliance of psychoanalytic criticism for the analysis of this artwork seems to be justified and may help to decode the meaning of the film’s symbols of the film.
Works Cited
Castle, Gregory. The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory. John Wiley & Sons Incorporated, 2007, Web.
Elliott, Anthony. Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.
Evans, Robert C. Close Readings: Analyses of Short Fiction from Multiple Perspectives by Students of Auburn University Montgomery. Court Street Press, 2001.
The Wall. Directed by Alan Parker, United International Pictures, 1982. Web.