A Bionian Approach to the Body and the Feminine in Cammell and Roeg’s Performance

ABSTRACT

This psychoanalytic study of Performance (directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970) explores the importance of the bodily, sensorial, and material aspects of a pivotal moment in the development of the protagonist’s sexual identity and considers how this moment has been conceived as being dependent on a certain containing function that is performed by a female character. Drawing on Bionian and post-Bionian theory, the article proposes that this containing function is fundamentally feminine. The feminine function of Bion’s concept of container is one that has been discussed especially in the theorization of the roles performed by the mother and the analyst. This article aims to investigate the importance of the bodily and the feminine aspects of the container as part of a psychoanalytic conceptualization of psychical growth as they present themselves in this film.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Lisa Baraitser, Stephen Hartman, Andrew Asibong, and my anonymous reviewer.

Notes

¹ All subsequent quotations from the dialogue are from this version of the script.

² Mattias Frey (2006) establishes a connection between the synaesthetic experience of hallucinogens and Laura Marks’s concept of tactile visuality, relating them to the opening up of possibilities of identification with the other (p. 374), although this remains a brief passage in his article, which focuses instead on the sartorial metaphor of “trying on” different identities as the central conceit that brings both parts of the film together.

³ The idea that alpha-function operates during the intrauterine stage is suggested by Joan Raphael-Leff (1993, p. 52) and taken up by Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger (1997, p. 381).

⁴ Elsewhere, in her consideration of the role of the body in unconscious fantasy, Bronstein (2011) argues in terms of “different forms and levels of symbolic functioning rather than in terms of either presence/absence of a capacity to symbolize” (p. 184).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carla Ambrósio Garcia

Carla Ambrósio Garcia, Ph.D., completed her doctorate in Film Studies (funded by Fundação Ciência e Tecnologia in Portugal) at King’s College London, where she is currently a teaching assistant. She has published articles on film and psychoanalysis in two edited collections and in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Her monograph entitled Bion in Film Theory and Analysis: The Retreat in Film is forthcoming with Routledge. She is also an artist filmmaker, working primarily with 16mm film.