Mrs Loraine Haywood

Loraine Haywood is a PhD. candidate and has previously held a position as an Honorary Associate Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries, and Social Science, College of Human and Social Futures, at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She explores violence and trauma that resonates through performances of the Real in film; significantly within imagined outer space futures. Thus, astronaut science fiction films are valuable case studies in this research. She questions the current turn to outer space and the colonisation of other celestial bodies, arguing that these are the future traumas of humankind. She is an interdisciplinary researcher breaking the boundaries of the disciplines in cinema studies, history, mythography, psychoanalysis, cultural theory, and hauntology and applying these diverse areas to outer space.

Her research draws on the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud that are the “dark continents” of the mind. Freud’s theories arose in concurrence with film, colonisation, and imperial conquest. Jacques Lacan’s theories of human reality including the effect of the anamorphosis is the recognition that images, and therefore film, can harbour the Real of death.     

In my thesis I use psychoanalysis in an unconventional way by applying its method to the future of outer space travel. Michael Roth claims that “psychoanalysis is history” (2016, 245) because as a method it restores the past to the present. However, there are glimpses in Freud’s work of the future traumas of humankind. So it is to human futures that I address my arguments concerning outer space, trauma, and the myth of the hero.