Psychoanalysis and Film

Glen O. Gabbard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429917707
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology

This volume contains a collection of outstanding examples of psychoanalytic film criticism, applying different theoretical orientations, drawn from the first four years of the film review section in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis during author's tenure as film review editor.

1. INTRODUCTION

GLEN O. GABBARD

In 1895 there were two auspicious births. The Lumière brothers invented a rudimentary film projector, signifying the birth of the cinema, and Studies in Hysteria appeared, inaugurating the new science of psychoanalysis. Throughout the twentieth century the two new disciplines have been inextricably linked. As early as 1900 a writer would describe his psychotic episode in terms of ‘the magic lantern’ effects of the nickelodeons (Schneider, 1985). By 1916 Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg was applying psychological understanding to the study of the cinema. He suggested that ‘the photo play’ more or less replicated the mechanisms of the mind in a way that was more compelling than the typical narrative forms of storytelling. In 1931 the American film industry was already being called a ‘dream factory’ (Ehrenburg, 1931), reflecting the close resemblance between film imagery and the work of dreams.

The cinema and psychoanalysis have a natural affinity. Claude Chabrol, the esteemed French film-maker, reported in an interview that he had collaborated with a psychoanalyst in the writing of his film, La Cérémonie (Feinstein, 1996). He explained why such collaboration was useful: ‘It’s very hard, when you deal with characters, not to use the Freudian grid, because the Freudian grid is composed of signs that also apply to the cinema’ (1996, p. 82).

The marriage between movies and psychoanalysis occurred in spite of Sigmund Freud. As far as we know, Freud had little regard for the cinema as an art form and appeared almost oblivious to the development of movies during his lifetime (Sklarew, 1999). His attitude was perhaps best illustrated when Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn offered him a $100,000 fee to consult on a film he was planning to shoot in 1925. Freud rejected the offer without a second thought. The New York Times of 24 January 1925 displayed the following headline: ‘Freud Rebuffs Goldwin: Viennese Psychoanalyst Is Not Interested in Motion Picture Offer’ (Sklarew, 1999, p. 1244).

Freud’s views were not endorsed by all of his disciples, however. The Austrian director G. W. Pabst sought psychoanalytic consultation when he made his 1926 classic film, Secrets of a Soul. He was able to enlist the help of Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs as psychoanalytic advisers. A psychoanalyst is instrumental to the plot of the film in that he cures the protagonist’s knife phobia and impotence through the interpretation of dreams. Indeed, the classic mechanisms of Freud’s dreamwork (displacement, condensation and symbolic representation) are depicted with remarkable accuracy.

From the nineteen fifties onwards, analysts began observing that the psychological study of cinematic art might be just as fruitful as Freud’s applications of analytic thinking to the plays of Ibsen, Shakespeare and Sophocles (Wolfenstein & Leites, 1950). In subsequent years an entire field of psychoanalytic film criticism has evolved, much of it centred in academic film departments. The French periodical, Cahiers du Cinéma, has been extraordinarily influential since it began systematic examinations of American and European films in the nineteen fifties. The Cahiers theorists subsequently appropriated Italian semiotics as well as the ideas of the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Many of these ideas crossed the Channel and began appearing in the British journal Screen, and within a few years American scholars began appropriating the same concepts, especially the psychoanalytically informed feminist critics who wrote for journals such as Camera Obscura and Discourse.

In 1997 the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis decided that the time had come to include film reviews alongside the usual collection of book reviews in the pages of the Journal. This editorial decision represented an acknowledgement that cinematic art should now be taken seriously as a cultural achievement alongside art, literature, music and drama. Indeed, films have become a storehouse for the psychological images of our time. To a large extent they serve the same functions for contemporary audiences as tragedy served for fifth-century Greeks (Gabbard & Gabbard, 1999). They provide catharsis in a way that is analogous to Greek tragedy, and they also unite audiences with their culture through their mythological dimensions in the same way that Aeschylus or Sophocles provided a vision for the citizens of Athens.

This volume contains a collection of outstanding examples of psychoanalytic film criticism drawn from the first four years of the film review section in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis during my tenure as film review editor. Some contributors are academic film scholars, while others are psychoanalysts with a keen interest in film. A number of different theoretical orientations are applied in the film essays contained in this volume, so the reader will note the same theoretical pluralism that is characteristic of our era’s clinical psychoanalysis.

Regardless of one’s chosen theoretical orientation to the understanding of film, a set of methodological problems typical of all applied psychoanalysis must be addressed. First, in the absence of the associations of a patient and the here-and-now phenomena of transference and resistance, the psychoanalytically informed film critic must be creative in identifying material for analysis. Freud encountered these same difficulties in his forays into applied analysis. In his essay, Moses and Monotheism, he made the following observation: ‘I am exposing myself to serious methodological criticism and weakening the convincing force of my arguments. But this is the only way in which one could treat material of which one knows definitely that its trustworthiness has been severely impaired by the distorting influence of tendentious purposes. It is to be hoped that I shall find some degree of justification later on, when I come upon the track of these secret motives. Certainty is in any case unattainable, and moreover, it may be said that every other writer on the subject has adopted the same procedure’ (1939, p. 27fn.).

Much of the controversy in applied analysis has revolved around whether the art object itself is the appropriate subject for analysis, or, rather, the biographical features of the artist that may contribute to our understanding of the forces shaping the artistic creation. Both may be fruitful subjects for exploration, and psychoanalytic film scholars have made productive use of both approaches. Obviously, when one applies a psychoanalytic lens to the text of a film, one cannot hope for a definitive reading. A more modest goal is to emphasise how clinical psychoanalytic theory can illuminate what appears to be happening on the screen and the manner in which the audience experiences it. As Coltrera (1981) has argued in considering applications of psychoanalytic thinking to biography, the primary aims are to be internally consistent and psychoanalytically valid rather than to construct absolute truth. Over time a variety of methodologies have attained some degree of legitimacy as psychoanalytic approaches to film. There are at least seven time-honoured methodological approaches, most of which are illustrated in this volume of psychoanalytic film criticism essays. A brief overview of these prevailing methodologies may help orient the reader to what follows.

THE EXPLICATION OF UNDERLYING CULTURAL MYTHOLOGY

Ray (1985) has stressed that the early Hollywood producers unwittingly served as cultural anthropologists. Their films, especially those that were successful at the box office, tapped into the commonly held unconscious wishes and fears in the mass audience. In pleasing the audience, film-makers also articulate the cultural mythology of the era, specifically Lévi-Strauss’s (1975) notion that myths are transformations of fundamental conflicts or contradictions that in reality cannot be resolved. Just as dreams function as wish-fulfilments (at least in many cases), so do films provide wish-fulfilling solutions to human dilemmas. In the 1946 classic, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, for example, the post-World War II audience vicariously experienced the magical resolution of three pervasive internal conflicts: adventure/domesticity, individual/community and worldly success/ordinary life. As Ray (1985) has argued, the film does not so much resolve these anxieties as push them to one side: George Bailey (James Stewart) joyously declares that money is not important at the same time that friends save his life by showering him with money. It’s a Wonderful Life strikingly acknowledges its anxieties (as well as those of the culture) in George’s fantasy sequence, where a world emerges whole from the darker American visions of film noir. Audiences loved Capra’s film, however, because its ending so completely disposed of what had briefly returned from the repressed.

In this volume Ronald Baker’s essay on the films of Clint Eastwood examines our cultural mythology of screen masculinity. In a thoughtful analysis of Play ‘Misty’ for Me, Tightrope, Unforgiven and The Bridges of Madison County, Baker notes that Clint Eastwood systematically deconstructs the Hollywood myth about what it means to be male, a myth that Eastwood’s early films were instrumental in generating. As Baker notes, ‘The traditional Hollywood myth of masculinity is thus challenged and undone by the icon of the screen patriarchy himself’ (p. 158).

THE FILM AS REFLECTIVE OF THE FILM-MAKER’S SUBJECTIVITY

Biographical material about the auteur (the film-maker who is the guiding creative spirit behind a particular film) may shed light on the events and meanings of a particular movie. For example, the extensive hostility towards women documented in Alfred Hitchcock’s biographies may help audiences understand the sado-masochistic overtones in male–female relationships in a considerable number of Hitchcock’s films (Gabbard, 1998). This biographical material, however, can be submitted to alternative readings as well. Modleski (1988), for example, has used details from Hitchcock’s life to argue that the director actually identified with women, even placing his male characters in abject, ‘feminised’ positions comparable to those in which he may have found himself.

This mining of the film-maker’s subjectivity to understand a film is illustrated by Argentieri’s essay on Truffaut in this collection. She applies a psychoanalytic lens to two of Truffaut’s films from the late nineteen seventies, L’homme qui aimait les femmes (The Man Who Loved Women, 1977) and La chambre verte (The Green Room, 1978). Argentieri regards these two works as perhaps serving a reparative function for Truffaut. In these films she postulates that Truffaut describes for the audience and for himself his own childhood trauma of not having possessed a symbolic space in the internal world of his mother or the possibility of constructing within himself a safe and stable image of the female figure. These films are thus a canvas in which the director attempts to work through and repair problematic childhood experiences and conflicts.

THE FILM AS REFLECTIVE OF A UNIVERSAL DEVELOPMENTAL MOMENT OR CRISIS

Often the atmosphere or narrative of a film beautifully captures common developmental crises that are vicariously experienced by audience members. For example, one possible reading of Cocteau’s 1946 masterpiece, Beauty and the Beast, is to view it as a story of an adolescent girl successfully coming to grips with male genitality. In Ridley Scott’s 1979 science fiction film, Alien, a paranoid-schizoid world right out of Melanie Klein is created in which a persecutory object (the alien) is introjected, reprojected and then is at large within the space vessel, serving as a source of extraordinary paranoid anxieties (Gabbard & Gabbard, 1999). Part of the appeal of the horror and science fiction genres is related to the audience’s vicarious mastery of infantile anxieties associated with earlier developmental crises. The audience can re-encounter terrifying moments involving early anxieties while keeping a safe distance from them and knowing that they can survive them.

The contribution in this volume by noted film scholar Slavoj Zizek examines both Titanic and Deep Impact from the perspective of the Oedipus complex. Zizek suggests that Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact (1998), for example, is a drama about an ‘unresolved protoincestuous father–daughter relationship’ (p. 165). Much is made in the film of how a televi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The end of time: a psychoanalytic perspective on Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries
• 3. Hitchcock’s Vertigo: the collapse of a rescue fantasy
• 4. Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game
• 5. Hidden in the imagery: an unconscious scene in The Conformist
• 6. “Ah doctor, is there nothin’ I can take?”: A Review of Reservoir Dogs
• 7. Arthur Penn’s Night Moves: a film that interprets us
• 8. Lone Star: signs, borders and thresholds
• 9. Letters, words and metaphors: a psychoanalytic reading of Michael Radford’s Il Postino
• 10. Truffaut and the failure of introjection
• 11. I have not spoken: silence in The Piano
• 12. Over-exposure: Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb
• 13. Narrating desire and desiring narration: a psychoanalytic reading of The English Patient
• 14. The Remains of the Day
• 15. Deconstructing Dirty Harry: Clint Eastwood’s undoing of the Hollywood myth of screen masculinity
• 16. The thing from inner space: Titanic and Deep Impact
• 17. Chinatown
• 18. Saving Private Ryan’s surplus repression
• 19. M (1931)
• 20. Remembering and repeating in Eve’s Bayou
• 21. Watching voyeurs: Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960)
• 22. Egoyan’s Exotica: where does the real horror reside?
• 23. The real thing? Some thoughts on Boys Don’t Cry
• 24. 15 minutes of fame revisited: Being John Malkovich
• 25. The Sixth Sense