「라이프 오브 파이」는 난파와 식인이라는 극적인 소재와 상상력을 자극하는 탄탄한 구성으로 문학성을 인정받은 원전 소설을 최첨단 3D 로 영상화한 작품이다. 영화는 다양한 해석이 공존하지만, 본 연구에서 는 난파와 표류라는 극한 상황에서의 생존서사와, 주인공 파이가 겪는 심리적 불안과 절망이라는 정신세계에 주목하고자 한다. 불완전하고 유 한한 존재인 파이와 호랑이 리처드 파커에게 투사되는 야수성과 인간 성, 절망과 희망, 신과 구원의 문제는 결국 인간 본성에 대한 탐구로 귀결된다. 이러한 이해를 바탕으로 본 연구는 프로이트의 정신분석학적 접근방법을 통해 삶과 죽음의 경계에 선 파이의 두 가지 이야기를 인 간 존재에 대한 탐구라는 측면에서 분석하고자 한다.

프로이트(S. Freud)가 환상의 미래 (The Future of an Illusion)를 발표한 때가 1927년이었다. 이때 엘리엇(T. S. Eliot)은 종교에 대한 관심을 적극적으로 표현한 때여서 환상의 미래 에 대한 평가는 한마디로 ‘이상한 책’(a strange book)이었 다. 그 ‘이상하다’는 반응은 프로이트의 오이디푸스 콤플렉스 측면의 종교관에 서 비롯되었다. 종교는 현실 거부와 함께 소망스러운 환상 체제에 불과하며 신 의 믿음은 이상화된 ‘아버지’ 인물을 투사한 유아적 망상 이상도 아니라는 프로 이트의 주장은 오히려 엘리엇에게 자신의 종교적 신념과 기독교 문화의 현실성 을 되묻게 해 주었다. 결과로서 엘리엇은 영국국교 논의를 통해 종교문화는 역 사적이고 사회적 실체라는 점을 기독교 사회에 대한 사고 와 문화 정의에 관 한 소고 를 통해 적극 변증하였다. 종교를 문화사회적 실천 행위로 접근하는 이 런 자세는 오늘날의 종교공동체들 사이의 충돌과 인종들 간 이해관계의 의미를 되돌아보게 한다.

In the period of nationalism, W. B. Yeats's works address the loss of nation and resolute fights for independence and remembrance of the fighters killed in the struggles. Freudian ideas of mourning and melancholy and moral masochism and Jacques Rancière's ideas of colonial 'policy' or 'police order' and postcolonial 'politics' can provide effective tools to understand characteristics of the post-colonial works by Yeats. By putting side by side Freud and Rancière, we can produce a combination of mourning-colonial police-order vs. melancholy-post-colonial politics. The colonial police-order induces the colonized Ego to forget the loss of nation and move on to other objects, for example, money, through mourning. Melancholic post-colonial fighters derail the workings of mourning espoused by the colonial policy or police order. Melancholy and moral masochism of the colonized Ego are the driving forces of post-colonial struggles. Melancholy of the colonized Ego and sadism of the Super-Egoic demand of independence and moral masochism of the colonized Ego can explicate the bloody and 'erotic' relationships between the colonized Ego and the womanized ideal of nation, which have been interpreted as 'fatal mistress,' 'eroticized politics' and 'vampirism' by many Yeats critics. But melancholy and moral masochism drove the colonized Ego to fall into a fatal love relation with the female symbol of nation demanding unconditional sacrifice of the colonized Ego, which renders 'eroticized politics' and 'vampirism' noticeable.

환상은 인간의 정신과정을 이해하기 위한 중요한 메타심리학 임상 개념으로 심리내적 구조와 외적 세계에 영향을 미치는 강력한 심리적 현실이다. 환상은 무의식적 소망충족이 이루어지는 장이면서 사디즘과 불안의 도피처, 그리고 증상이 형성되는 심리적 공간이다. 욕망의 구조화과정에서 환상은 욕망의 재현과 충동의 표상물이다. 본 논문은 인간의 가장 본질적인 내적 세계에 들어가기 위한 필연적 관문인 환상의 정신분석적 의미와 메커니즘에 대한 멜라니 클라인의 정신분석이론을 제시하며 이를 프로이트와 비교 분석한다.

Yeats suffered greatly from the love affair with Maud Gonne but particularly from the contradiction that she manifested. The poet devoted his love and poems to her in vain. But the contradiction is not peculiar or unique problems to Yeats but all men in Western patriarchal tradition. Indeed women for men are figuring simultaneously as madonna and whore, angel and beast. Because the woman has the power to provoke the tumult of desire in man and to gain over him through the desire, the men is afraid of being weaken by her, infected with her feminity and of then showing himself incapable or castrated. The fact that woman from a phallocentric viewpoint appears to be castrated is as reassuring for men as it is alarming. On the one hand, he projects her as lack and sees himself completed in her, thus confirming male hegemony. On the other hand, the so-called castrated woman can reflect back to man a dangerous paradox: if she had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger by her. In order not to be a paralyzing threat, a woman must have phallic attributes and must become the phallic woman idealized beyond sexuality. The phallic woman is thus fantasized by the man as a defense against castration anxiety. Representation of the phallic woman, he believes, protects him against doubts about his masculinity. Making her like a man conserves the man’s narcissism. The ambiguous nature of the woman is well presented in Yeats’s “Presences.” Here Yeats categorizes the woman as archetypes “harlot,” “child,” and “queen.” And their seductive “rustle of lace or silken stuff” evokes a contradictory femaleness over which he has no rights and which can move rapidly from vulnerable to ruthless, even turning that very vulnerability into a disturbing power over him. In “A Bronze Head,” the woman representative of Maud Gonne remains mysterious and inaccessible, overflowing the ‘images’ and ‘forms’ in which he tries to capture her. In “No Second Troy,” Yeats blames Maud Gonne for her violent political action, perhaps because she cannot be desexualized, idealized, or fetishized fully as he wishes. One of the reasons that Yeats is desperate to prevent the woman from being involved in the politics is that for Yeats the ideal form of a woman would not allow for difference to infiltrate the idealized autonomy. In this sense Yeats prays for his daughter to be the woman with nature of mindless organic spontaneity and for her bridegroom to bring her to a house of custom and ceremony. The idealization of the woman as nature into civilization, however, will not entirely do because it inescapably exposed to the fearful power of death. As Freud argues in Civilization and its Discontents, Eros’s sublimation of the nature into civilization inevitably exhausts its power, which leaves it vulnerable to Thanatos that then threatens to destroy the social order one has so laboriously constructed. The dilemma of sublimation is well explicated in Yeats’s “Mediations in Time of Civil War“ where he perceives the conflict between insistent demands of death drive and the inhibitory requirements of civilization. “Leda and the Swan” shows that the phallic civilization is born together with the brute power of violence and destruction that is to threaten all the social orders. By desexualizing, idealizing, or sublimating the woman, the man may reduce the horror of castration. But his attempt is radically self-defeating and self-undoing, for the more he sublimates her, the more likely she becomes the destroyer of ideal orders. Because of this paradox, the woman remains ontological aphoria to Yeats.