Unlearning the Visual Regime (Through the Eyes of David Cronenberg) This thesis, through a close reading of a selection of films by the director David Cronenberg (specifically: The Brood, Dead Ringers, Crash, A Dangerous Method), explores what Georges Didi-Huberman terms the "phantasmic link" between seeing and knowing. Taking into account the inception of psychoanalysis through Sigmund Freud's psychiatric work on hysterical patients whose visual symptoms do not correspond to a physical cause, the project explores the limits of what we can claim to know about what we see. Visual coherence as an imposition constitutes part of the subject's fragile construction of reality, symptomatic of the condition of the split subject. Cronenberg's specific brand of body horror renders the most familiar parts of the subject, the body (our physical manifestation) unrecognizable in order to subvert basic assumptions of what we know, to insist there is some part of ourselves, each other, and the surrounding world that we cannot know. Maier-Katkin, Hannah Creator Copjec, Joan advisor Rambuss, Richard reader Brown University Department of Modern Culture and Media sponsor 2018 58 p. born digital eng Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2018 Modern Culture and Media Psychoanalysis Cronenberg Horror text theses 10.26300/pvbp-jx03In CopyrightCollection is open for research.