she undresses in her ostensibly private room. In Peeping Tom (1960), directed by Michael Powell, Scopophilia is mentioned as a psychological affliction of the protagonist, Mark Lewis. As narrative cinema, Peeping Tom is a deliberate exercise in voyeurism for the protagonist and for the spectator, which demonstrates how readily the protagonist and the spectator are mentally willing and morally capable of watching atrocities (torture, mutilation, death) that should not be gazed upon as narrative movies. The mentally ill protagonist acted as he acted consequent to severe mental mistreatment in boyhood, by his film-maker father; the paternal abuse mentally malformed Mark into a reclusive, introverted man comfortable with torturing and killing people. In the 1970s, parting from Lacan's propositions, psychoanalysts of the cinema used the term scopophilia to identify and to describe the aesthetic and emotional pleasures (often pathological), and other unconscious mental processes that occur in the minds spectators gazing at a film. Yet voyeurism and the male gaze are psychological practices basic to the spectators' emotional experience of viewing mainstream, commercial cinema; notably, the male gaze is fully presented, described, and explained, and contrasted with the female gaze, in the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), by Laura Mulvey. Subsequent scholars have challenged Mulvey's influential reading of scopophilia as a "gross reduction of the erotic and the aesthetic to the politics of representation." See also References Further reading John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972) Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (1989) External links Alain de Mijolla, 'Scoptophilia/Scopophilia' 'Scopophilia...' Psychoanalytic theory Film theory Visual perception Paraphilias