title: Embodied female experience through the lens of imagination.
abstract: In 1971, I made a film entitled Self Portrait of a Nude Model Turned Cinematographer in which I explore the objectifying 'male' gaze on my body in contrast to the subjective lived experience of my body. The film was a radical challenge to the gaze that objectifies woman - and thus imprisons her - which had hitherto dominated narrative cinema. Since the objectification of women has largely excluded us from the privileged phallogocentric discourses, in this paper I hope to bring into the psychoanalytic dialogue a woman's lived experience. I will approach this by exploring how remembering this film has become a personally transformative experience as I look back on it through the lens of postmodern and feminist discourses that have emerged since it was made. In addition, I will explore how this process of imaginatively looking back on an artistic creation to generate new discourses in the present is similar to the transformative process of analysis. Lastly, I will present a clinical example, where my embodied countertransference response to a patient's subjection to the objectifying male gaze opens space for a new discourse about her body to emerge.
authors.forename: Sharon R
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Green
mesh_terms: D003379:Countertransference; D005260:Female; D019513:Feminism; D005783:Gender Identity; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D009040:Motion Pictures; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy; D055815:Young Adult