Wu Chen (Chinese, 1280-1354), Manual of Ink – Bamboo, 1350, ink on paper, National Palace Museum, Taipei.
Chapter 6 talks about psychoanalysis and methods that are used to decode images. Through this discipline we can find that any image has an effect on the viewer through unconscious mind, sexuality, and human subjectivity. The viewer and his/her sexuality would generate the outcome depending on who is portrayed in the image, whether male or female, nude or not, and what is the setting in the image. Unfortunately psychoanalysis as a theory ignores all aspects of the image other than sexuality that creates a limited access and loss of information.
As we can see psychoanalysis is typically used to describe sexual content of the image. The most part it deals with defining the sexual difference within the image to be able to indentify the audience it was produced and created for. However, to be able to do that the visual imagery would have to contain people of some sort to create a statement. Because it is based on sexuality, the image that is reviewed would not contain enough data to support this definition.
In the book there are many examples of images containing human figures that are defined as follows. On the page 127 (Visual Methodologies) there is an image from the movie “Hitchcock’s Vertigo” that is described using the “male gaze” and “castration complex” approaches to the cinema. It has been said that the hero in the movie follows a woman and the degree of his obsession with her.
By these facts we can see that psychoanalysis would be successfully used in defining human characters in the cinema or images containing human figures (page 116, Visual Methodologies) and not images that contain purely vegetation or paintings that contain nature as a dominant structure to its visual because nature does not contain sexuality as sexuality is a human created definition that is used to describe sexuality of males and females or humans but not the environment and bamboos.