Using psychoanalysis to understand why we love monsters
Any approach in psychology can be used to help us understand different behaviours. Here is an example of how the psychoanalytic approach can be used to explain why people appear to be universally drawn to the idea of monsters. Tales of monsters and horror are to be found in a huge range of cultures. There are also instances of remarkable similarity between the legends of otherwise quite distinct cultures. For example, some form of “undead” are to be found in the folklore of cultures as diverse as Haiti (zombies) and central Europe (vampires). This suggests that the idea of monstrous undead must serve a psychological purpose. A psychoanalytic psychologist might suggest that monsters represent the human fear of death and, in overcoming the monsters we can overcome our fear. From a Freudian viewpoint, battling and overcoming monsters may represent the Oedipus complex, in which a monster—symbolising the same-sex parent—attacks but is vanquished (Minsky, 1998).
By considering the historical context of certain films we can see how films may express the anxieties of the time, and help people deal with their, possibly repressed, anxieties. Following the First World War, a number of films such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera featured disfigured heroes. According to Skal (1993) these may have represented society’s coming to terms with the mass disfigurement resulting from the war. With the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, wolves and werewolves became particularly popular monsters, symbolising the marauding, predatory nature of the Nazi threat.
Following the war, with American and European politics dominated by the Cold War, film horror was dominated by alien invasion, symbolic of the threat of war with Russia. Meanwhile horror comics became dominated by images of corpses returning for revenge on the living. Skal draws a link between this and society’s collective guilt following the death of 40,000,000 people in the Second World War. Godzilla, produced in Japan in 1954, involved a radiation-mutated monster rampaging through Japan burning all in its path, and possibly relates to the devastation caused by the atomic bombs.
In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, a major theme in horror was of demonic children. Examples included Village of the Damned, The Omen series, Rosemary’s Baby, and It Lives. Skal suggested that these films represented society’s anxiety following the sexual revolution, and perhaps the horror following the revelation of the effects of Thalidomide, the anti-morning sickness drug that caused babies to be born with missing limbs. More recent trends in horror can also be linked to the anxieties of society. In the 1990s there were a number of films involving computer domination, for example Terminator.
From M. Jarvis (2000) Theoretical approaches in psychology. London: Routledge Modular Series.