Conclusion (Dreamcatchers, Hallucinogenic Drugs, Alternative Medicine)

There are implications to things that are not text driven in American society that can be filtered through the psychoanalytic lens.
 For example, dream catchers.

 The tradition of dream catchers originally stemmed from Native American culture. They were made from, usually, a hoop of willow (a shape which symbolized strength and unity), small bits of beading, feathers and arrow heads placed decoratively and then hung over the head of the bed board. The dream catcher was intended to protect a sleeping individual from unhappy or threatening dreams that move through the air, catching those in the center webbing, and allowing happy dreams to pass through. The negative dreams that get stuck in the webbing and are unable to pass through to the individual's unconscious are destroyed when the sunlight touches them at dawn. Lore dictates that "the good dreams know how to pass through the dream catcher, slipping through the outer holes and slide down the soft feathers so gently that many times the sleeper does not know that he/she is dreaming. The bad dreams not knowing the way get tangled in the dream catcher and perish with the first light of the new day." Now, I'm not sure about everyone in the audience, but I do know that when I was a child and I had bad dreams that would keep me awake, my parents gave me a dream catcher, telling me it would help me to sleep and protect me from the scary things that were terrorizing me in the night. I was so excited when I received it, and immediately put full faith into it. And you know, it worked. But maybe not for the reason I thought it did or the Native Americans thought it did. It's a psychological trick of sorts. When I did experience bad dreams with the dream catcher hanging, my mother would come into my room to hear me crying, would blow on the dream catcher and move it to a different location, saying that the door was blocking the good dreams from entering, or the cob webs just needed to be shaken off to make it as good as new. And again I believed this. A dream catcher works because someone told you it would. We tend to place faith in wives' tales or folk lore, things that have been continuously stated. It gives us something to believe in, something to put faith in, and ultimately makes our resolve stronger. A dream catcher is a mind trick, a tool used to instill faith in a material object that might "keep the demons away", and there is where the true power of a dream catcher is, in your head. Mind over matter, you believe it and thus it is so. A dream catcher works on a subconscious level to ease the mind and provide an outlet of belief therefore because the child believes it keeps the bad dreams away and has faith in it, it works.

 Another example of something easily psychoanalyzed is hallucinogenic drugs, such as mushrooms.

  "Magic mushrooms" have been used for as far back as 9000 BC in North African indigenous cultures. The Aztecs used a substance called teonanácatl, which means "flesh of the gods," that many believe was magic mushrooms. Clearly, there is a connotation involved with magic mushrooms, they are highly illegal and do cause impairment called "trips". However, what really becomes psychoanalytical is the reason mushrooms are taken by users, the euphoria they provide. With the increased boost in serotonin, the brain is elevated to a state that is quite unlike our uninhibited conscious. Experiences generally last 3-8 hours although can feel like days in length. Most users experience "waves of intoxication with feelings of inner warmth, and colors appearing unusually vibrant or beautiful. Perception feels enhanced and people feel able to interpret reality in a new and different way." Intensity of thought as well as expansion of the conscious is noted.The anterior singular cortex as well as the hippocampus (both are responsible dreaming) are also activated. In a college conducted study, 1/3 of the people given the mushrooms said they had the best and single most spiritual experience of their lives, while 2/3 of the participants said they would do it again(statistics taken from above video). So clearly, there is a psychoanalytical aspect behind shrooms. People choose to take them for the dreamlike state they can enact, for their ability to escape the reality and retreat to the surreal and enhanced recesses of their brain, unlocking the unnatural to experience the otherworldly. They find that mushrooms give them the ability to answer existential questions about themselves and their lives that they otherwise would not be able to touch base with. Thus mushrooms are popular in their ability to allow individuals to disconnect with the real world, and imagine a dream-like scape in which their mind wholly paints on its own the reality it conjures. The mind altering state that people wish to achieve with the use of mushrooms makes it a very psychoanalytical concept.

Our last metatextual topic includes alternative medicine.
Types of Alternative/Complementary Medicines

Alternative medicine, also known as holistic therapy, is an approach to medicine beyond that of mere prescriptions and pills. Holistic doctors believe that to achieve true health, there must be a balance between the physical and mental state of the patient. Specifically here, we will focus on holistic medicines aimed at the mind.
Both standard and holistic medicine recognizes the gravity between a balance in the mind and body for the overall health of an individual. Studies have concluded that healing is directly attuned to good emotional and mental health. Now, there are tons of different types of of medicines designed specifically for the mind, but three of the most popularly used ones include: meditation, hypnosis and biofeedback. Hypnosis and meditation are actually fairly similar as well, and have been recognized as meritable treatments, and extensive research has actually proven that hypnosis is no joke, although it is still a phenomenon not totally able to be explained. The simple way to explain it is that in both hypnosis and meditation, fast-brain wave activity (which deals with thinking and processing) is slowed, and the slow wave activity results in increased focus as well as relaxation. Most often, hypnosis is prescribed as treatment for chronic pain conditions. During an EEG scan of a brain under hypnosis, the therapist asked the person to imagine the difficult pain they were feeling wasn't painful at all, that it was more just bothersome. Immediately the receptors in the brain that process pain decreased, and the patient experienced decreased pain. So basically what happened was, the meaning of "pain" in that part of the brain, as the brain was reading it, was almost reassigned. Mind over matter. A simple switcheroo in the brain during a relaxed state brings pain down to just a manageable nuisance. The malleability of the brain is what makes it able to conform and accept the change, and it is remarkable. Once mental pain is fixed, it benefits the whole body and adds to overall health, physical or mental, a statement accepted by physicians of an discipline.
When we feel pain, that can lead to stress. Stress can lead to anxiety which can lead to lack of sleep, decreased performance in activities and therefore cause strain on our entire bodily unit. Starting at the source of the pain, in this case, improving the mental health of the patient that leads to decreased pain, the entire body is helped. It also starts in the mind.

Like that of a dream catcher, a trick of a mind relieves a child's nightmares, they believe and therefore it works. In the case of the hallucinogenic drugs, becoming elevated and outside of reality to answer existential questions that cannot be found in the real world, is an attractive factor to those seeking a surreal mental experience. And with health, as physical can effect mental, the vice versa is also correct, mind and body must be united in order to truly live a happy and healthy life, when the two are not united and a change is made in mental state, improvements follow shortly after in overall health.

Psychoanalytic Analysis of Radiohead's Karma Police (1997)

Karma police
Arrest this man
He talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge
He's like a detuned radio

Karma police
Arrest this girl
Her Hitler hairdo
Is making me feel ill
And we have crashed her party

This is what you'll get
This is what you'll get
This is what you'll get
When you mess with us

Karma police
I've given all I can
It's not enough
I've given all I can
But we're still on the payroll

This is what you'll get
This is what you'll get
This is what you'll get
When you mess with us

For a minute there
I lost myself, I lost myself
Phew, for a minute there
I lost myself, I lost myself

For a minute there
I lost myself, I lost myself
Phew, for a minute there
I lost myself, I lost myself

Biography and History on the Band Radiohead

OVERVIEW:

The song "Karma Police", released by Radiohead in 1997, features six stanzas of four and five lines apiece. Throughout the lyrics and in the song, repetition of lines and key points can be noticed such as "this is what you'll get", "I lost myself". The music video itself creates an interesting perspective on the lyrics as well, as the audience is put into the driver's seat of a car. The car drives for a while on a dark, dirt road, and the headlights illuminate a man, fuzzy at first, fleeing from the car which appears to be running him down. The first time "this is what you get" is sung by Thom Yorke, is when the man initially appears clearly, his face one of fear as he sprints from the catching car, which interestingly enough seems to be moving fairly slowly. Once he begins "phew for a minute there, I lost myself" the view zooms from the back of the running man to his actual face, the first time we see it so far in the video. Nearly right after this, the man stops running, walks, then drops to the ground. The car continues to move, stops, abruptly pulls away revealing an oil trail. The runner promptly picks a lighter from his pocket, proceeds to light it and the fire blares toward the car which reverses again trying to escape the flames. The video ends with this scene and the deconstruction of the music itself.

ANALYSIS MICRO

After watching the video with the music, the meaning behind the text itself becomes clear. Here we have a man, seeking revenge on these people, the man who "buzzes like a fridge" and the girl with "the Hitler hairdo". They wronged him in some way, so he calls upon the Karma Police, a figurative term. However karma is defined as "the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences." Thusly, Karma police takes on the meaning of those who enforce fate, or set into motion a series of events trigger by a specific act. Yorke is asking for help from the Karma Police to indict some kind of ultimatum they brought upon themselves by doing him wrong. He seeks revenge for these people in their acts that caused him some sort of harm or anger. It appears though, in the video, the speaker does not get their revenge, but rather the runner. We can't really tell what happens to either us in the driver's seat or the runner who stops to watch the flames catch and run down the car, but we can guess that the runner escaped and revenge was not heeded.

ANALYSIS MACRO

With the additive of the video, lyrics and definition of karma itself, the text can be read psychoanalytically. Here we have someone so caught up in the destruction of others and revenge against them for their wrongdoings to him, the man actually "lost himself" in the process of seeking payback. His own sense of self and identity is challenged with the introduction of blind anger as well as vengefulness. When reading something psychoanalytically, one of the big things you look for is ego, or strong emotions set in place to harm. Our singer certainly is feeling strong emotions that bring him to the point where he resorts to what looks to be a murder attempt in order to set things right between himself and wrongful act the runner must have committed. This causes him to lose himself, lose his own life and his own sense of self getting caught up in ruining other people's lives for his ultimatum. Blind emotions caused the ultimate crash and burn here.

The music and chords themselves at the end of the song symbolize the deconstruction of the singer as a person when the music deconstructs down to simple discord. His strong willed emotions and desire for payback end up ultimately causing him to relinquish part of his own humanity, his own sense of reasoning, and by chasing down the runner or the girl, attempting to exact his own method of treatment that he sees fit for their crimes against him, he becomes almost unrecognizable to himself. He ultimately suffers in the end for his attempts, not so much those he wishes to harm. His confrontation and fixation on their revenge becomes all consuming to the point where he has to step back and stop himself, realizing that it has gone to far and he lost control over himself and unchecked emotions that drive him to the point that he would actually consider hurting another human being outright to satisfy himself. This unconscious drive appears scary to the speaker once he realizes what he's doing, and he steps back from the situation considering himself lucky that he did not in fact exact his revenge because that would have resulted in him losing himself, his morals, his identity. The "phew" indicates that it must have been a close call once he realized what he was doing and the implications that would follow not only for the subject of his warring, but to his own character, would be devastating. The speaker's position and loss of self identity eventually seeps through his conscious as he sits back and thinks "what am I doing?" He ultimately realizes that his blind revenge, which he previously seemed unaware of, is undoing him as a person, reducing him to something he doesn't even recognize as himself.

Psychoanalytic Analysis of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979)

Learn More About Giger and His Work

OVERVIEW:

Alien, a film by Ridley Scott, is quite possibly one of the most iconic sci-fi horror films ever portrayed. It follows the crew of Nostromo, a large commercial starship floating around in deep space. The members aboard the ship are awakened from cryo-sleep in order to answer a rogue distress call from a nearby alien vessel. This is where things begin to go wrong for the unsuspecting crew. Upon being awakened, the crew hears continuously receives the distress calls, and upon reaching the alien ship, finds a nest of eggs inside the vessel. Upon sending one of the crew members, Kane, into the ship's holding where the eggs are found, an organism attaches itself to his face, rendering him comatose. When brought back to the ship it is found that the parasite is supplying Kane with oxygen and removing it would cause his immediate death. Kane is left in quarantine. Later the creature is found dead, and Kane is left alive. All appears well until a creature bursts from Kane's chest having been layed inside of him by the first creature. He dies, and the horror continues for the crew.

ANALYSIS MICRO:

Pictured above are drawings of the alien in the film as created by artist H.R Giger. When Scott first pursued a designer for his creature, he had in mind a certain aesthetic that came with Giger's work. For his work on Alien, Giger has won multiple awards including "Best Achievement for Visual Effects", and his mix of surreal, with organic and mechanical forms helps greatly contribute to a psychoanalytical reading of Alien. When looking at the prototypes for Alien, sexual imagery is clearly portrayed in the creature itself. The shapes are, well, penile, including the head and tongue extension, and it's organic figure is not something of beauty, but is fairly hypersexualized in the positions in the above images. The erotic view on the Alien, which combines natural with the unnatural, is only spurred with the impregnation of Kane with it's offspring. However, Giger did not only work on the adult alien pictured above, he designed the rogue ship which was filled with the eggs, Kane's original face-hugging alien, and the serpent like chest bursting alien offspring as shown in the top video. From infancy and birth from Kane's chest to the fully grown adult creature, the erotic aesthetics of the aliens and Giger's art work hyper sexualizes the alien and adds a sense of organic to the mechanical and parasitic alien that causes the crew so much grief. 

ANALYSIS MACRO:

The alien is not the only part of the film that lends itself to psychoanalysis. The rogue ship itself is packed with biological looking forms, that lend themselves to the reproductive cycle . When Kane first finds the eggs, he enters into a ship which seemingly resembles a womb-like state (a tight, dark room with the eggs attached to the floor) which is opposed to the figure of the adult alien who also appears more of a male. The ship is layed out seemingly as a uterus, where the eggs are incubating. It's dark, compact and filled with various caverns and tunnels, or tubes, that house the eggs. Much like fallopian tubes that carry eggs to the uterus to grow. The egg chamber, once Kane finds it, also does something fairly curious when touched. The covering of the eggs react to touch, it bursts, revealing the eggs inside violently. When Kane does this, it's like he has fertilized the eggs, entering the womb like room to them. His example, finding the room, touching the veil, the veil retracting to reveal the eggs, he is the sperm to the situation. He's done something he cannot undo, and has set into motion the course of events to follow where he himself becomes impregnated. Here we have another insertion of a Freudian theory, the Oedipus Complex, stemming from the Greek tragedy. When later in the film, the alien, in it's slithering serpent form bursts forth from Kane's chest, we have the idea that the son murders the father, one half of Oedipus Rex, when later the son goes on to marry the mother, which never really happens in the movie. Freud's theory of a child having an attraction to a parent of the opposite sex and thusly having a poor or treacherous relationship with the other parent is applied. Kane dies at the hand of "his son", the infant alien in the chest burster scene. Aha, child sabotage, kid murders his father. 

Now, there's another type of relationship that deals with Ripley, the main female character of the Alien series, and MU-TH-UR 6000 (Mother), the ship's computer motherboard that acts as a guiding factor to the crew. Ripley disagrees with the computer when it puts capturing the hostile alien invader above the lives of the crew members on board the ship. Female to female relationship in which the computer is named Mother, it seems we have another tumultuous offspring to same gender parent dealing here. It only becomes more clear when another crew member, Ash, who is employed to care for Kane in his comatose state appears to be on opposite ends of the spectrum with Ripley and agrees with Mother. He follows out the initial request to capture the alien, and if need be at cost to the crew member's lives. Ash is a male, a son, and has a positive relationship with mother relating back to Oedipus Complex again. When he is discovered to be nothing but a machine himself, he really becomes a son figure to the Motherboard, machine to machine. 

All this is done to imply rape of some sort. From the rogue message like that of a 911 dispatcher, to Kane forcibly entering the womb-like chamber of the rogue ship and inciting fertilization where he was not welcome, to the parasitic creature intubating him and starving him of oxygen for its own gain, to the violent birth of the infant alien from Kane's chest, to Ridley running throughout the film from the masculine phallic adult alien, rape is portrayed in an unnatural, powerful, otherworldly and terrifying way from both the male and female perspective
Exchange between Mother and Ripley:

[Ripley has tried in vain to disengage the Nostromo's self-destruct]

Ripley: Mother! I've turned the cooling unit back on. Mother!

Mother: The ship will automatically destruct in "T" minus five minutes.

Ripley: You... BITCH!

Between Mother, Ash, and Ripley:

Ripley: Ash. Any suggestions from you or Mother?

Ash: No, we're still collating.

Ripley: [laughing in disbelief] You're what? You're still collating? I find that hard to believe.

Ash: What would you like me to do?

Ripley: Just what you've been doing, Ash, nothing.

Psychoanalytic Analysis of The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road official movie trailer, 2009.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy PDF Book

OVERVIEW

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, features a post apocalyptic world stuck in a nuclear winter. A father and son are the main characters, and they are forced into constant survival mode in the harsh environment, fearing death at every waking turn. The boy, born into the world after its destruction, poses a unique set of morals for all living things, which is seemingly opposed to the father who is immediately on edge facing any other living member of the destroyed world. His mode of action is threatening and always points to the pistol he carries, while the boy seeks to save those they stumble across, as hopeless or hateful as they may seem.

ANALYSIS MICRO

The Road features an interesting moral dilemma between the father and son, who often disagree on moral issues, which curiously enough do not seem to mirror their beginnings. The man, who grew up in the flourishing world, versus the boy who was born just after the onset of the nuclear winter. Aside from this opposition in morals, the man and the boy both dream. The man's dreams are often filled with his wife, who left them at the start of the world's destruction because she believed that their survival was futile. The dreams often placate her features, nipples, breasts, slender frame with which her dress clung to, slightly sexualized and very Freudian. He also dreams of beautiful things, the world as it once was and this scares him further, for he believes the only dreams for a man in peril to be having are perilous dreams. The boy, on the other hand, does not so much dream as have nightmares. Nightmares that haunt him and cause him to cry out for his father. He seems less focused on his mother who he barely mentions and more so focused on the realities of their life. Interestingly enough the boy with the kind heart has the most fear, which the constantly on edge father imagines beautiful landscapes and his wife who deserted them both.

The dreams in the text play a significant role in the storyline. Nights where the man does not dream worry him almost as much as the beautiful dreams he wakes himself from, and express his sexual tension toward his wife who is dead, though he seemingly cannot forgive or forget. The boy's dreams are never fully described yet are always in the form of nightmares, fear for their current situation that he does not express during the waking day. Both the man and the boy's dreams express their inner fears or turmoils, the man's however being the most hyper sexualized and harboring the most psychoanalytic meaning.

ANALYSIS MACRO

The man clearly harbors some unresolved feelings for his wife, though not in the way one might primarily expect. We are given a brief perspective into the wife's coldness with a scene of her leaving. He begs her to stay, to fight for the boy and himself, to try to survive in the ugly and ravished world as best as they could as a family. You can feel the stabbing agony the man feels when the wife tells him she wants to die, that there is no point in  try to salvage anything because they will all perish. For such a cold and harsh relaying of reality, the man dreams of her very fondly. He dreams of her in her thin cotton dress, of her breasts and her nipples, her physical features who are described very attractively, in a very wanting way. He loved her very clearly, so much so that even in the current state of affairs the man faces with the boy, his dreams of her are colorful and vivacious, full of youth and beauty as well as desire. The descriptions are very hyper sexualized and outline the man's need for her love, attention and companionship in the desolate landscape which is devoid of all of these things. This only elevates the certainty of the man and the boy's terrible current situation, and seeks to above all show what the man desires most, which is not a paradise of survivors or a inherently a bunker full of food, but the woman. Her touch, her essence, what he lost when the world turned dark.  His dreams of her elevate him, and mirror his subconscious desires that waver often from mere animalistic survival.

The man also dreams about nature before its destruction. Of the flower and trees, small things that are taken for granted today, that were gone in their world. It is perhaps this that proves why the man is so angry and hasty when it comes to other survivors. Unlike the boy, he remembers the world in its prime. He also remembers those responsible for its destruction: humans. Mankind's role in the now desolate world is what makes him bitter, what shapes his dreams and fuels his anger. He dreams of the beautiful things of the old world, and this thusly fuels his fire and hatred toward those he meets upon the road, those so capable of destroying nature. The dreams seek to unlock his unconscious morals, they create an anger in him that he directs at others, an anger for what once was but what was taken from him. The dreams are a receptacle throughout the text. They show the power of the subconscious over actions, in this case morals, and also deeply rooted desires and man's need for love and desire in the form of companionship. These dreams throughout the text also keep the man moving foreword and fighting, when he finds himself thinking of the past he awakens with a new stronghold on forgetting the old world and moving forward with the boy for safety. When he does not dream, it is at the worst parts of the text, such as when the boy is dying. The dreams act as a motivating factor, illuminating his purposes, his subconscious desires, and his reason for continuing on down the road.