![]() I aim to refute Spoto's explicit and implicit contentions that Hitchcock merely exposed his psychological problems for public view, and to propose instead that Hitchcock molded this material, consciously and unconsciously, into artistic form. Spoto's detailed, well-informed analysis opens up the question of whether any or all art can be so detached and analyzed or whether there remains something ineffable in the act of creation that cannot be broken down into elemental components. ![]() Spoto's rendition of the film director's gifts is a reductionist one, not in the sense of the reduction of psychological motivation to biology and chemistry (Peele, 1981), but in the view that an artistic vision can be reduced to a specific set of psychological or psychopathological elements. Without considering this psychological profile, Spoto maintained, it is not possible to make sense of the Hitchcock oeuvre or of the sources of Hitchcock's creativity. Hitchcock's pathological urges, according to Spoto, included misogyny, sadistic tendencies, and fantasies of rape bathroom and various other fetishes about sex and the body overwhelming guilt, anxiety, and a mother fixation and phobias toward women, people in general, and the world at large. In his best-selling biography of Alfred Hitchcock, Spoto (1983) claimed that the celebrated film director of the macabre and the unsettling was a man in the grip of uncontrollable impulses. ![]() Personality, Pathology, and The Act of Creation: Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 9(3):202-218, Summer 1986.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |