Psychoanalysis & Film

The cinema artist creates and presents inner world dynamics of our intimate wishes and desires or of our silenced fears. They ask us to claim their visual presentation of authenticity or inauthenticity, reverie or trance, pretense or deception, masquerade or subterfuge; all these through encouragement of genuineness within their fabrications.

Filmmakers ask the viewer to wonder or worry what will happen next or to anticipate the story's ending. Films ask us to cry, to laugh, to feel sorrow, or to find surprise in illusions on the screen. Simply put, a filmmaker's creativity awakens emotions in others.

In psychoanalysis, the analyst encourages a patient's reveries and memories of emotion. We listen to nuisance, to tears, to unspoken emotions, to thoughts unknown. Psychoanalysts search for hidden creativity, illusion, fantasy, and daydreams. We work to liberate inner world dynamics of the Self. Psychoanalysts search for the metaphoric filmmaker within our patients and ourselves. We find life in screen memories and the unreal blank screen now dances with emotional expression, genuine mutuality, delight, and hope.

Both film and psychoanalysis reveal numerous levels of who we are and who we are not. Both film and psychoanalysis enable our awareness that we are creative beings full of dreams and fantasies about the Self and the Self in relation. Both film and psychoanalysis use emotional narratives or affect-laden stories that allow us to feel 'anything is possible.'