Methodological windows : a view of the uncanny through filmmaking, psychoanalysis, and psychology

Filmmaker Susannah Gent employs a diverse range of methodological approaches to investigate the uncanny, including art practice, psychoanalysis, and scientific survey. Following Mark Solm's assertion: ‘There can’t be a mind for neuroscience and a mind for psychoanalysis. There’s only one human mind’, (Schwartz 2015) she believes that interdisciplinary approaches will reveal interesting peripheral elements which would not come to light through single field investigations. In collaboration with cognitive psychologists at Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Sheffield, Gent plans to undertake an eye tracking survey and an fMRI study which aim to see if scientific approaches can lead to uncovering a neurological underpinning to the uncanny. Currently Gent has a undertaken a behavioural study which has produced an image set of 300 images rated according to eeriness valance by 250 participants. In this presentation Gent will look at the top ten of those images and discuss why she feels psychoanalysis offers the best analytical tools for understanding how these images act upon the participants. The image set is intriguing and includes, in the top ten, an image of euphemistically named prairie oysters from a cookery blog, suggesting that the Freudian castration complex may hold a place in the collective human psyche. Humanistic investigations compliment scientific research as they employ methods unavailable to objective research, essential when researching subjectivity. The specificity of scientific method is a fruitful compliment to the broader, speculative approaches of humanistic inquiry. Filmmaking employs an intuitive, responsive method, guided by affect and arguably employing a different, possibly pre-linguistic brain region to the other more reasoned approaches. As such, this research-in-progress evaluation of interdisciplinary approaches is underpinned by the conviction that different methodological approaches can be seen as windows that can provide a variety of views on the same subject, in this case, the uncanny. Keywords: psychoanalysis, psychology, filmmaking