Visible Mind

Movies, modernity and the unconscious

Christopher Hauke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134456284
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Why is the moving image so important in our lives? What is the link between the psychology of Jung, Freud and films? How do film and psychology address the problems of modernity?

Visible Mind is a book about why film is so important to contemporary life, how film affects us psychologically as individuals, and how it affects us culturally as collective social beings. Since its inception, film has been both responsive to historical cultural conditions and reflective of changes in psychological and emotional needs. Arising at the same moment over a century ago, both film and psychoanalysis helped to frame the fragmented experience of modern life in a way that is still with us today. Visible Mind pays attention to the historical context of film for what it can tell us about our inner lives, past and present.

Christopher Hauke discusses a range of themes from the perspective of film and analytical psychology, these include: The Face, The Shadow, Narrative and Story, Reality in Film, Cinema and the American Psyche, the use of Movies in the Psychotherapy Session and Archetypal themes in popular film. Unique to Visible Mind, six interviews with top film professionals from different departments both unlocks the door on the role of the unconscious in their creative process, and brings alive the reflexive critical thinking on modernity, postmodernity and Jungian psychology found throughout Visible Mind.

Visible Mind is written for academics, filmmakers and students who want to understand what Jung and Freud's psychology can offer on the subject of filmmaking and the creative process, for therapists of any background who want to know more about the significance of movies in their work and for film lovers in general who are curious about what makes movies work.

Part I

WATCHING MOVIES

1

INTRODUCTION

Modernity, fragmentation and film

Figure 1.1 Charlie Chaplin in City Lights.

Cinema as temenos

Towards the end of his life, Sergei Eisenstein (1949: 3) put it quite simply:

Photography is a system of reproduction to fix real events and elements of actuality. These reproductions, or photo-reflections, may be combined in various ways.

In one sense, this is still true today. In some ways nothing has changed, and yet everything about film now is different. Since 1895, cinema has grown to be a dominant medium of creativity and communication world-wide. Its genius lies on at least two levels. At the level of the viewer, watching movies is both a collective and an individual experience. In a word that emphasises the transpersonal communication possibilities of movies, the French and the Russians call a gathering of people viewing film a séance. If we take a moment, we might think of a special place set apart from daily life, one where you go and sit for a period of time – a beginning and ending which is known about and set beforehand – a place where you anticipate a greater degree of involvement with your own self, with the transpersonal and with humanity in general. It sounds like a church doesn't it? It also sounds like a psychotherapy session. But this is also the experience of the cinema. Jung likened the containment of psychotherapy – the relationship, and the regular time and space – to a temenos – a Greek word referring to the sacred precinct around a temple where the presence of the god may be felt. It is not the inner temple, but it is a place apart, in between, and separate from, the daily life of the street. The alchemists borrowed this concept to refer to the sealed vessel within which their transformations might take place – an analogy that also appealed to Jung. Watching a movie at the cinema involves a similar containment: attendance at a special place set apart from daily life and always in darkness, staying for a length of time bracketed by the time taken to screen the film, and – like church but unlike therapy – all done in the company of others as a collective experience, all eyes trained in the same direction. So, again like therapy, this is not a regular social occasion – ordinary talk is not exchanged at the time, for example – but all are aware of sharing the same experience, albeit with as many individual variations as there are seats in the theatre.

Cinema as temenos has the possibility of becoming an imaginal space: by engaging with films a version of active imagination is stimulated which can then engage the unconscious – potentially in as successful a fashion as our conscious attention to dream imagery and other fantasies. In addition to this, and similar to a Jungian psychotherapy session, the experience of film offers a special place where psyche can come alive, be experienced and be commented upon. Often the experiences sought and encountered in therapy can be both intense and painful, and for this reason they are often defended against and avoided in daily life. Popular cultural forms such as cinema can provide the holding necessary for intense experiences, making them more accessible and more bearable. When an intensity of emotion is mixed with the less intense it becomes bearable, bringing with it the possibility for psychological and emotional repair and growth. As in therapy, the raw material offered by cinema is made available in a form that the psyche can work upon more consciously. As Jung said (1931a: para. 195):

The spirit of the times … shows itself … significantly, in cinema and jazz. These are characteristic symptoms of our time, which has extended the humanistic ideal even to the body … The cinema, like the detective story, enables us to experience without danger to ourselves all the excitements, passions, and fantasies which have to be repressed in a humanistic age. It is not difficult to see how these symptoms link up with our psychological situation.

Jung is implying that in this ‘humanistic’ age, we no longer have to watch the cruelty of gladiators forced to fight lions or each other, but these days – if Jung had only known – we watch Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000) knowing Russell Crowe will be stay safe from harm, because ‘it's only a movie’.

Jung's view is that, in modern times, we are living with a particular style of dominant consciousness based on over-rational, linear, hierarchical and pragmatic thinking. This has been the type of consciousness promoted since the Enlightenment, when conscious reasoning was elevated as the overriding application of the human mind. The rise of science over religion and superstition enabled an examination of nature and the material world which brought discovery, inventions, industrial production and a new way of life for many. Bacon urged science to ‘put Nature to the rack so she may yield up her secrets’ which suggests the ferocity with which scientific discovery and exploitation was undertaken. Others have noted how we have broken up the world into manageable pieces so we may examine it more fully, but we have lost sight of the relationship of these to each other and to the whole.

Jung agreed with Freud's psychoanalytic model that showed we have ego-consciousness and a personal unconscious, but he goes beyond this to conceive of a collective unconscious which all humans have in common which has evolved over half a million years of human existence. The implication of this is that, no matter how atomised modern individuals might seem, there is a collective ground to our humanity that persists in the psyche. Because we are not in touch with this aspect of ourselves in modern times, it makes itself known largely in projection. We are extraordinarily extraverted in modern culture and we tend to locate outside of ourselves much of what comes from within. We were not always like this. In ancient, mediaeval and pre-Enlightenment times, human beings bridged their inner and outer worlds by the use of symbols. Our symbolic attitude meant we projected our inner fantasies and archetypal impulses on to an external world full of living symbols. At one stage, these took the form of gods and spirits of rivers and forests in the natural environment and, later, symbolic mysteries of the Holy Trinity and Virgin Mary in early Christianity. In fact, as we see with the celebration of Christmas and Easter, the Christian symbols derived strength and power from being laid over earlier roots of the pagan symbolism of Winter's death and rebirth in Spring.

Jung believed humanity left something important behind once it embarked on the Enlightenment's project to approach the world and ourselves using reason alone. Not only did he reckon ‘It is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilization’ (Jung 1995 [1961]: 263), but Jung also saw that we have settled for a very one-sided style of consciousness. Under these conditions, the unconscious will seek to compensate for such an imbalance, and it will do this partly through our neurotic symptoms, partly through the activity of our dreams and fantasies, and partly through projection on to the world around us. It is my contention that cinema now constitutes both a site and a vehicle for our projections, especially the projection of archetypes of the collective unconscious. The making and viewing of films is vital in an age that has, in Jung's words, abandoned the gods on Olympus. In fact, he said ‘The gods have become diseases’. Because we have stopped projecting on to such living symbols, our psyches are alive with internal activity seeking an outlet. In films it is possible to find archetypes projected as characters and themes, so we can, in turn, project ourselves into these stories and know more of our human potential through participation. Peter Homans situates Jung's life and his psychological ideas firmly in the conditions of modernity that arose in the late nineteenth century which led to a new type – ‘psychological man’:

Psychological man tends to view the social order as destructive of personal, inner integrity rather than as a means of fulfilling and completing that integrity. Consequently, he turns away from socially prescribed values and instead attempts to construct value and meaning in terms of his own self-consciousness … Carl Jung's life and thought exemplify this feature of psychological man in what can only be called and extraordinarily precise and all-encompassing way.

(Homans 1979: 199)

Cinema and modern times

Not so long ago, to see moving images you would have had to go to a cinema or another form of screening-room with a projector to handle the celluloid film. Before the cinema, you might be lucky enough to live where people were making film and then screening the result in the local village hall, as did Mitchell and Kenyon in Blackburn. From 1897 onward they screened ‘Local Films for Local People’ whose activities were their main subject matter. In France, from 1895, the Lumière Brothers were thrilling audiences with their short films screened in the basement of a Paris cafe.

It is no coincidence that at the peak of modernity – when industrial urban societies were at their most confident and complacent – events and concepts arose to disrupt and challenge this state of mind. Disasters of industrial civilisation like the sinking of the Titanic and the slaughter of the Great War (1914–18) disenchanted the civilised populations of Europe and America. When all had thought such barbarity of war was over, Germany, the nation that had given the world the sublime music of Beethoven and Bach, fought ‘a war to end all wars’ – as it was thought at the time. This was a post-Ford war conducted along factory production lines, with on-time deliveries to the front as men and munitions were used up and replenished – the words ‘machine’ and ‘gun’ were not put together before the 1914–18 war. Prior to this, Charles Darwin had pointed out that humankind was not central to creation after all but had evolved from primitive forms, while Karl Marx had explained how human economic behaviour was not so freely chosen as thought, but subject to forces of ownership, production and consumption of which the participants were unconscious. This turning of the world on its head was topped by Freud's psychoanalytic theory which revealed that, as human beings, we were far from being in charge of our own decisions and motives in a purely rational way, but were governed by unconscious drives which competed with the conscious mind. Following from this, Jung was the only psychoanalyst to recognise how the values of modernity impinge on the psyche – creating difficulties that appear individual and psychological, but are the result of general cultural conditions.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the age which produced these critical approaches to modern life – enabling the population to reflect on their own subjectivity perhaps for the first time – also developed the technology that could reflect their lives back to themselves, framed on the cinema screen. The first films were screened publicly in Paris in 1895, the same year that Freud was delivering his initial findings in psychoanalysis and Jung was turning his reading of Nietzsche into what would become his psycho-social theories of analytical psychology (Jung 1896). Judging by its huge popularity, the invention of film came at exactly the right moment. The arrival of moving pictures seems to coincide with a general need for self-reflexivity and self-knowledge already being generated elsewhere in the culture.

In an essay entitled ‘Image in Motion’, the Jungian analyst Pat Berry maintains that the movie film was not only ‘born of’ modern consciousness but ‘is modern consciousness’ (Berry 2001: 71). Berry points out how the rapid acceleration of urban life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century ran the risk of a chaotic over-stimulation of the senses. Gaudy, ubiquitous advertising, electric light, business and travel speeded-up by the railway and telegraph, and the first motor-cars – all had transformed the human scene beyond recognition. Modernity spawned disorder, fragmentation and psycho-pathologies – not only neurasthenics reacting to machines and railways, but also Charcot's hysterics in Paris, and Freud's and Jung's patients in Vienna and Zurich. Motion pictures became popular because, Berry suggests:

Perhaps transformation into art is one way of dealing with the overstimulation of modern life. Art binds chaotic impressions into form … Perhaps film emerged when it did because it was just the therapy people needed to bind into manageable form the chaos of modern overstimulation.

(ibid.: 71–2)

Lumière's film Workers Leaving the Factory (1895) was a fifty second short which by 1896 was being shown to two thousand people a day in the basement of Paris's Grand Café. Why was this so popular? Here were scenes anyone could see in the flesh – with colour and sound – happening at the end of their street or in the back garden (Repas du Bébé, Lumière, 1895). What made these scenes so fascinating on film? Berry reckons that, ‘the act of filming creates or perhaps releases the “psyche” of the subject. The scene is no longer simply nature, but art …we are magnetized by it’ (ibid.). There is a loss in that the tangibility of the real event is sacrificed, but the transformation into art provides excitement and pleasure – framed on the screen and repeatable. In a new world of more and more fleeting impressions – and unlike the sc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Part I Watching movies
• Part II Making movies
• Part III Projecting movies
• Glossary of Jungian terms
• Film list and ‘Watch This’ clips
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index