Huge thanks to everyone who came out this weekend! What a wonderful presentation and discussion afterwards. So many fantastic insights. And most especially thanks to Mary for such an engaging lecture. Looking forward to Mary’s event on Lynchian Women in January!
In the meantime, be sure to register for the online launch event for Mary’s brand new book Psychoanalysing Horror Cinema (Routledge 2025) care of the Freud Museum London on Wednesday, November 19th. REGISTER HERE. (It’s free/ donation based – all proceeds raised go to the Freud Museum London).
Feminine Jouissance in Horror Cinema with Mary Wild
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan spoke about the possibility of an unlocatable feminine enjoyment that exists outside of the common discourse. He claimed that feminine subjectivity has access to an unsymbolised pleasure, which he contrasted to masculinity being bound to conditions of rising and falling. Female eroticism, within this theoretical framework, is foreclosed by the male due to her surplus of gratification. Women’s sexual autonomy forces them to occupy the paradoxical position of being both alluring and threatening. As a result, female sexuality is expelled to the forbidden realm of the inexpressible and death.
In this lecture, we will investigate representations of feminine jouissance in three films: Possession(1981) dir. Andrzej Żuławski, Paranormal Activity (2007) dir. Oren Peli, and Kiss of the Damned (2012) dir. Alexandra Cassavetes. The proposition is that women are capable of a transgressive and excessive bodily pleasure that reaches outside of the phallocentric order (male created discourse). This supplementary enjoyment causes women to be pushed out of a conscious collective reality; functionally it produces an (at best) ambivalent and most often fearful response within a culture that happens to confront female sexual power. In this context, reference will also be made to the psychoanalytic structure of hysteria, specifically to interpret the violent physical component of women in these films.
Mary Wild @psycstar is a leading voice in cinema studies, and the creator of the Projections lecture series at Freud Museum London, applying psychoanalysis to film interpretation. She is the author of Psychoanalysing Horror Cinema (Routledge 2025), and posts exclusive content on Patreon and Substack.
