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Film is a good vehicle for psychoanalytic exploration - in its process and its content. Film has been called as a ’dream screen’, and people used to project their dream, phantasy and their understanding of life on the screen. And then the cinema touches the audience’s mind and induce different reactions. There are two different approaches in psychoanalytic understanding of cinema. The first approach is emphasizing the cinema as an act and process, and the second approach is regarding the cinema as an object of seeing. Understanding cinema as a process focus what happened between the cinema and the audience, and understand this process in terms of Lacan’s theory of mirror stage, the imaginary, the symbolic, the lack and the absence, and the suture. Primary identification with the camera as an all seeing eye, voyeurism and fetishism are the major topic of this theory. Understanding the cinema as an object of seeing focus the narratives of the film, and we reconstruct the people’s unconsciousness on the movie as we analyse the patient’s unconsciousness. In classical psychoanalytic understanding, the similarities of the cinema and the dream in it’s content and process, the scopophilic aspect of cinema viewing, and the primal scene with it’s implicit meaning of object loss and oral component are the main focus. Hitchicock’s ’Rear Window’ is a very excellent text of cinema and cinema viewing. This movie is essentially grounded on the psychological mechanism of the cinema viewing - the voyeurism and the primal scene, and it has been called as an essay of cinema and cinema viewing. This movie also reflect Hitchicock’s separation anxiety and unconsciousness, and in that point it is a good text to understand cinema.
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