In the Mood for Love and the Socio-Historical Neuropsychoanalytic Subject

As emphasised by Nancy Blake’s psychoanalytic reading of Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, this film is “an attempt to come to terms with the anxiety and confusion inherent in the reality of Hong Kong existence”, one that “[places] viewers in ideologically–produced frames of meaning” (Blake 342). Indeed, In the Mood for Love, while known for its meditation on love, loss and frustration, is irrevocably concerned with a sense of place (or a sense of dis-placement) and, with that, a clear political critique. This “reality of colonial history” is manifest in the film via the “individual drama” within the displaced Shanghainese community enclaved in Hong Kong (Blake 344). A doubly-displaced subject is thus created, and is placed amidst an economy of exploitative late Capitalism, the absence of representative democracy, the lingering gaze of a totalitarian regime, and a conformist collectivised people. The environmental pressures and psychological product thus become exemplary of the structuring of desire as explained by psychoanalysis, where the “death drive,” substitution, frustration and compulsive repetition become especially apparent. In other words, we are attempting to briefly introduce a socio-historical, neuroscientific account of the psychoanalytic subject.

While it may seem reductive to take the liberty of supplanting Freud’s developmental and sexual psychology with a socio-historical account, it nevertheless may serve to ‘modernise’ the psychoanalytic tradition, whose value, for me, lies in its higher-level descriptions of desire and social interaction. Here, we’ll take the liberty of replacing “deficient or disturbed primary affective relationships” (which lead to the death drive) with the absence or inaccessibility of the home or hometown, which brings along with it a lack of belonging, familiarity, and safety (Alparone and Tiscini 4). In the Mood for Love, through its Shanghainese expatriate protagonists, presents two such cases: (1) the 50s-60s mass immigration of mainland Chinese populations to Hong Kong during and following the Communist Revolution around which the film is set, and (2) the end of colonialism in the 90s in the transient space of Hong Kong in “a time out of chronology”, during which the film was produced (Blake 343). Our two main characters thus represent both points of historical inflection, which result in paradoxical behaviours or self-restraint and self-sabotage akin to that of addictive, or further, masochistic subjects.

Let’s look at the first diner scene. Upon this first opportunity to establish ‘rapport’, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) speak to each other through the substitute of their never-present partners. Immediately, Blake’s assertion that “all lovers are substitutes for original passions that have been lost” is substantiated here. Chow and Su’s partners, by their absence, can be seen as representing this abstract “original passion”; in our case, this ‘original passion’ can be understood as some embodiment of the archetype of home, or heimlich (homely/familiar) (Blake 348). For our expatriates, Hong Kong is doubly foreign in that it is not Shanghai (being a different Chinese language, food and culture), while also being not China (being ruled by colonial powers). Hence, it is a place where the fulfilment of our ‘original passion’—the sense of belonging or familiarity—is impossible, or, in other words, it represents Freud’s unheimlich (uncanny/unhomely). The result of this unstable environment is a subject who is desperate to find stability, and who therefore overestimates the need for a sense of security and homeliness. And it is in this desperation that our subjects begin to align more with the representation than the specific object of desire. The lover, for example, becomes an abstract position that must be filled; “What is unbearable, in matters of love, is the knowledge that one is exchangeable, only a place holder”, echoes Blake, who quotes Marchetti, “in Wong Kar-wai's world, people function as commodified objects” (348). And that is what is precisely shown in the film: a set of lovers who become each other’s place holders in the absence of the ‘original passion’, and a set of lovers who present themselves as discarded place holders. In the end, all four involved individuals seem to blend into uniformity; Mrs. Chan and Mrs. Chow have the same handbags, and Mr. Chow and Mr. Chan have the same ties. In this way, their desire for each other is structurally produced by the search for substitutive symbols that might replace a ‘lost original’. In psychological terms, for the addictive subject, all substances, and in fact all aspects of life (work, children) become candidates for a “total and toxic relationship,” with “the structure of the object relationship always [remaining] the same” (Alparone and Tiscini 10). In the inaccessibility of ‘original passion’ or heimlich, that is, in this doubly removed colonial economy, workers are interchangeable labour; in the spatial logic of subdivided apartments, tenants are interchangeable occupants; the partners are interchangeable, the protagonists are interchangeable, and, ultimately, all are interchangeable with the lost objects they stand in for.

In the rehearsal or role-playing scenes, a similar desperate search and ultimate dissatisfaction are seen. Here, Chow’s line, “It’s only a rehearsal”, echoes eerily close to Freud’s acute observation, “repetition is not reproduction” (Blake 353). For psychoanalysts, repetition in In the Mood for Love is not “reproduction in the sense of representation of a referent or of a simulacrum”; rather, repetition serves to “screen the real understood as traumatic” (Blake 354). The implied ‘trauma’ of our two main characters is that of a horrific Japanese occupation, Communist Revolution, and the lead-up to Mao Zedong’s Red Terror (1966-1976). For Wong Kar-Wai and his two subjects, it also implies the inaccessibility of a time and a place they cannot return to, and must only relive in eternal imitation. In neurophysiological terms, a defective dopaminergic system due to this trauma of unheimlich (war and displacement) results in its hyperactivation as over-compensation, making “addicted subjects… perceive the object of pleasure, their substance of choice, as being more important for their satisfaction than it really is, thus producing a constant sensation of frustration” (Alparone and Tiscini 8). Essentially, these victims of intergenerational trauma and displacement-trauma (away from heimlich) have hyperactivated dopaminergic systems, making them caught in a cycle of unsatisfying pursuits of desire that force the subject to pursue again.

In the same scene, when Chow and Su attempt to re-stage their partner’s first betrayal to determine who made the first move, their performance is interrupted by its own fictionality. When Chow says, “Shall we stay out tonight?” Su breaks character and says, “My husband would never say that”; when, on a second attempt, she touches his suit, she breaks character again by saying, “I can’t say it”. Chow then voices their mutual realisation that “After all, it already happened. It doesn’t matter who made the first move.” There is thus this addictive and paradoxical tendency to derive pleasure through the anticipation of reproducing the real, original event, over-estimating the similarity between their role-playing partner and their actual partner, and instead creating a “constant sensation of frustration” (Alparone and Tiscini 8). Further research from Alparone and Tiscini shows that “retraumatisation [produces] endogenous opioids”—the pleasure of proximity and emotional intimacy—, creating a neurobiological loop that is structurally identical to addiction (10). These rehearsals, then, are a dramatisation of a compulsive and repetitive dopaminergic SEEKING system, hyperactivated by intergenerational trauma and displacement, “without a precise object”, promising satisfaction while producing frustration (Alparone and Tiscini 6).

The result then, of these two instances as well as many others, like the elongation of time and thus anticipation in the slow-motion sequences, is a dependent subject who “no longer responds to the principle of equilibrium, of a discharge of tensions, of homeostasis” (Alparone and Tiscini 11). Chow and Su’s experience of the trauma of unheimlich predisposes them to cycles of addiction and self-sabotage. In many ways, the displacement of our Shanghainese expatriate subjects mirrors the “crisis of Hong Kong itself,” torn between early and late capitalism, between totalitarian communism and colonial exploitation, between the present and the “predestined future by the Joint Declaration of Britain and China” (Blake 342, 343). We all, in a way, in our unheimlich moments, feel stuck in a “transient space in a time out of chronology, an exception to history”; our inescapable liminality (social, political, economic or otherwise) traps us into cycles of repeated frustration of our own making, as our base state is proven no longer be that of homeostasis, but of “dys-homeostasis” (Blake 343).

Works Cited

Alparone, Dario, and Giorgia Tiscini. “The Death Drive in the Light of Affective Neuroscience: Current Developments on Addiction between Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience.” L’Évolution Psychiatrique, vol. 91, no. 1, Mar. 2026, pp. e1–e13, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evopsy.2026.01.002. Accessed 7 Apr. 2026.

Blake, Nancy. ““We Won’t Be like Them”: Repetition Compulsion in Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love.” The Communication Review, vol. 6, no. 4, 1 June 2003, pp. 341–356, https://doi.org/10.1080/10714420390249220.

In the Mood for Love. Directed by Wong Kar-Wai, Janus Films/Criterion Collection, 1 Mar. 2001.

Justin is a sophomore studying Film and English. He can often be seen in the wild DPing a short film or music video on and around campus, some of which he directs himself. He refuses to identify with the niche film bro aesthetic, and thus openly enjoys Inception, Django Unchained and Se7en, even at the detriment of his reputation in the film student community.