He Garfunkeled Your Mother: a Psychoanalytic Reading of the Graduate

He Garfunkeled Your Mother: A Psychoanalytic Reading of The Graduate The 1967 film, The Graduate, staring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft contains a plethora of human idiosyncrasies that would be of the utmost interest to the psychoanalytic minds of both Freud and Lacan. For this reading, I will focus on the theories of both Freud and Lacan in accordance with textual evidence to prove that Benjamin Braddock never achieves happiness in the end of the film, but has only just prolonged his quest to fight a miserable human existence. The most glaring and obvious reading of this film focuses around the character of Mrs. Robinson. An obvious Oedipal Complex emerges as Ben and Mrs. Robinson begin an affair. As an older woman, who Ben never calls by her first name, Mrs. Robinson becomes a replacement mother for Ben. Ben’s jealousy for his father emerges as Ben begins to understand his father is not worried about his own future, though Ben himself is extremely unsure about what the future holds for his life. In fact, Ben’s father has built a distinctly upper class and well kept home for Ben and his mother. Ben subconsciously senses that his father holds all the power within the family dynamic as the sole breadwinner for the household. Understanding this unstated father-son rivalry, it is predictable through a Freudian interpretation that Ben would ultimately have sex with Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father’s business partner. By doing, Ben can displace his Oedipal desires of wooing his mother to distract from his father’s power and wealth without actually committing incest, and therefore displace his father from a position of power. The focus on mother imagery does not stop there. Ben is often depicted in water in the form of his swimming pool, or staring into the water of his fish tank. Tyson tells us that the imagery of “dreams that involve water, especially immersion in water, might also be about our relationships with our mothers” (Tyson 21). This explains

Cited: The Graduate. Dir. Mike Nichols. Perf. Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft. Embassy Pictures, 1967. DVD. Leitch, Vincent B. "Fetishism." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2010. 841-45. Print. Palmer, Donald D. "The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic." Structuralism and Poststructuralism for Beginners. New York, NY: Writers and Readers, 1997. N. pag. Print. Tyson, Lois. "Psychoanalytic Criticism." Critical Theory Today: A User-friendly Guide. New York: Routledge, 2006. 11-52. Print.