Frames of Mind

A Post-Jungian Look at Film, Television and Technology

Luke Hockley

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781841501710
• eBook ISBN: 9781841509952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The eminent psychologist Carl Jung is best known for such indelible contributions to modern thought as the concept of the collective unconscious, but his wide-spread work can also be fruitfully employed to analyze popular culture. Frames of Mind offers an introduction to the world of Post-Jungian film and television studies, examining how Jung's theories can heighten our understanding of everything from Chinatown and Star Trek to advertisements.

 

In this illuminating psychoanalysis of our media environment, Luke Hockley probes questions such as why we have genuine emotional responses to film events we know to be fictional, why we are compulsively driven to watch television, and how advertisers use unconscious motifs to persuade viewers.

 

 

 

1

CINEMA AS ILLUSION AND REALITY

At best, Jung had a somewhat ambivalent attitude to the cinema and indeed the media in general. There are only a handful of references to films in his writing, and most of these are made in interviews with journalists or found in records of group seminars. The main body of the Collected Works is virtually devoid of references to movies. Literature and art fare rather better than the cinema and have a whole, if somewhat slender, volume of their own (CW15, The Spirit of Man in Art and Literature). However, when Jung did mention cinema he seemed to appreciate the creative potential of the medium. He was particularly impressed by its ability to unlock the unconscious and to represent on-screen what are normally internal psychological processes.

The movies are far more efficient than the theatre; they are less restricted, they are able to produce amazing symbols to show the collective unconscious, since their methods of presentation are so unlimited.¹

Jung made this remark somewhere between 1928 and 1930 (it occurs in one of the supplementary volumes to the collected works, Dream Analysis) and probably earlier rather than later in that time frame. Almost thirty years later, he seems to have changed his mind as the cinema seems to have fallen out of favour. In an interview with the foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail in 1955, Jung comments:

The strains and stresses of twentieth-century living have so affected the modern mind that in many countries children are no longer able to concentrate. Here in Zürich the schoolteachers of the upper part of the lake asked me why it is that they are no longer able to carry out the full curriculum. The children, they said, seemed unable to concentrate. I told them that the fault lay with the cinema, the radio, television, the continual swish of motor-cars and the drone of planes overhead. For these are all distractions…Worst of all is television.²

Jung appears anxious about the pervasive nature of media, and the manner in which they were, and are, consumed. For example, elsewhere in the same interview Jung comments that he has nothing against music, but that he cannot stand background music, particularly if the music is good. He adds that while he can tolerate jazz in the background, Bach deserves to be listened to properly as it is, in his view, music which nurtures the soul. Perhaps the same might also apply to the movies. As such, Jung was not expressing a view about the intrinsic worth of the medium per se but rather commenting on the psychological attitude adopted towards it. This is typical of Jung, who tried to stay away from making aesthetic judgements about the artistic merit of a piece of art or literature. Instead, he attempted, with varying degrees of success, to adopt a purely psychological approach as he hoped this would provide further confirmation of his psychological theories. This approach is congruent with the clinical practice he established in which patients were encouraged to paint images from their dreams, not as an aesthetic exercise, but as a way of opening up a psychological dialogue with the unconscious.

While Jung might not have had much to say on the cinema, he certainly seemed to know what he liked. He comments, ‘The best movie I ever saw was The Student of Prague [1926]. It shows the separation of the conscious man and his shadow, so that the shadow moves by itself’.³ Elsewhere he remarks:

The great asset of the movies is the amazing effects they can produce. One sees the man and his reflection in the mirror, and the devil stands behind and beckons to the reflection of the student in the glass, and the reflection comes out in a quite extraordinary way and follows the devil. The student stares into the mirror and can no longer see himself, he is a man without a shadow. And the devil walks away.⁴

Interestingly, Jung made these observations at time when the movies were striving to achieve greater degrees of realism in the way in which they structured their narratives. At that time cinema was still in its infancy. The Jazz Singer (1927), the first feature-length film to use synchronized sound, only had a limited number of sequences of dialogue and singing – mostly the sound was courtesy of a Vitaphone Orchestra score. The rules of continuity editing and the conventional processes of film production had yet to be fully embodied within the Hollywood studio system. But what intrigues Jung is not the realist quality of the movies, rather it is the capacity of the cinema to create an illusory, or magical world – a world where shadows can move by themselves and where reflections take on a life of their own.

There are at least two factors at work here which need to be kept in mind in reflecting on Jung’s comments. One is his long-standing and pervasive interest in the metaphorical and the other is Jung’s passion for the symbolic. While this is conjecture, it may well be that the type of realist cinema which was to become the norm as the Hollywood studio system came to dominate film production, was not as likely to appeal to Jung as the more intense and visually expressive world of early cinema.

Another factor to bear in mind is that much early cinema was based around clearly mythological and psychological themes – The Student of Prague is one such film, being in essence a reworking of Faust. It is also in the tradition of German Expressionist film. This film movement is generally taken to refer to films produced between 1919 and 1923, and it encompasses numerous genres including romances, thrillers and fantasy. Visually the films are characterized by dramatic lighting design, with large shadows, stereotypical characters and acting which draws on the stagecraft of the German theatre to create a stylized décor. The result is an almost poetic film language that was ideally suited to the creation of an atmospheric setting.

Jung’s interest in the cinema, such as it was, seems to be with its ability to develop what was at the time a new visual and symbolic language that he believed could breathe new life into ancient myths and revitalize them for contemporary times. Perhaps Jung was also intrigued by the magical and phantasmagorical elements of the cinema as he was captivated by illusions that appeared to be real, as is well documented in his interests in spiritualism and mediumistic activities. Indeed, Jung often suggests that the distinction between reality and fantasy is much less clear-cut than is generally assumed in our everyday lives.

But what is ‘illusion’? By what criterion do we judge something to be an illusion? Does anything exist for the psyche that we are entitled to call illusion? What we are pleased to call illusion may be for the psyche an extremely important life-factor, something as indispensable as oxygen for the body – a psychic actuality of overwhelming significance.⁵

In the preceding passage from The Aims of Psychotherapy Jung is exploring the nature of the images produced by his patients and, in so doing, he implicitly places the image centre stage as a means by which to understand unconscious processes. He goes on in the article to make the distinction between psychological reality and conscious reality, with the proviso that both realities are equally full of illusion. Following this lead, there are two interwoven themes to follow. The first explores the central role that the visual image has in analytical psychology. The second develops these observations in relation to the cinematic experience. In so doing the intention is to suggest why it is that analytical psychology, in distinction to other depth psychologies, is a particularly useful approach in coming to an understanding of how images, and especially films, convey meaning. In so doing, the intention is not to marginalize other approaches. The cinema can usefully be studied and analysed from many different perspectives, but analytical psychology gives an insightful framework through which to explore both the shared and individual meanings of films. It also gives a language through which to articulate the shifting psychological nature of cinematic images, which, on the one hand, are illusory and collective, but which also have the capacity to speak in a relevant and meaningful manner. In fact, how viewers engage with the on-screen fictional worlds of film is unlike any other art form in the way that it blurs the boundaries between the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche.

A first step in this process is to remind ourselves that it is a fundamental tenet of analytical psychology that the unconscious and its images are real. A more cautious approach might be to say ‘psychologically real’, but for Jung what is true for the psyche remains true for life as a whole. This central principle points towards one of Jung’s most profound insights, namely that in order to understand the fantasies of patients, their dreams, neuroses, psychoses, auditory and visual hallucinations and such like, the ‘delusions’ must be accepted as real. His premise was that as they were real for the patients, for therapeutic purposes the analyst should also take them as real. For Jung, the realms of imagination and fantasy were part of the fabric of the material world. This will prove important in coming to a view about the psychological relationship audiences have with movies and the cinematic experience more generally. The blurring of the divisions between real and not real, between conscious and the unconscious, between the personal and the collective, will be of central concern since images facilitate the merging of what typically are regarded as separate realms.

It is important to be clear here about what Jung means by the term ‘image’. This is not as straightforward as might be imagined. For Jung, the image exists somewhere in the space between the unconscious and consciousness. The image is not fully vested with the influence of the unconscious because this would mean that it could be mistaken as something actual or concrete – that is the prerogative of hallucinations. Rather, it serves as a mediator between unconscious contents and outer reality. He describes it as follows:

When I speak of ‘image’ in this book, I do not mean the psychic reflection of an external object, but a concept derived from poetic usage, namely, a figure of fancy of fantasy-image, which is related only indirectly to the perception of an external object. This image depends much more on unconscious fantasy activity, and as the product of such activity it appears more or less abruptly in consciousness, somewhat in the manner of a vision or hallucination, but without possessing the morbid traits that are found in a clinical picture. The image has the psychological character of a fantasy idea and never the quasi-real character of an hallucination, ie., it never takes the place of reality, and can always be distinguished from sensuous reality by the fact that it is an ‘inner’ image.⁶

It therefore follows that such images need not be pictorial; rather they are metaphorical, like the image ‘heard’ in a piece of music. A psychological film theory needs to be concerned with both types of images. More explicitly, the interest rests on the interplay between the overtly audio-visual experience of films and their capacity to both awaken and to be part of our inner lives. In other words, the image exists not just on the screen but also somewhere in the space between the viewer and the screen. Interestingly, this view is consistent with the observation of Roland Barthes in his article Death of the Author (1977) in which he outlined his view that meanings come not just from the text, but also from what the reader brings to the text. In the case of the cinema, this may be an unconscious fantasy-orientated process in which the individual plays a role in creating an image – a unique psychosomatic relationship of conscious and unconscious processes activated by the progression of images and sounds on the screen.

Jung maintained that images are central to the construction of the psyche. The innate capacity of humankind to make images is for him what forms the substratum of psychological life. In turn these images refer us back to the deep structures of the unconscious which Jung termed archetypes. These are the patterns which influence our psychological development and growth. They are also the patterns that interact with our culture, our personal experiences and family lives to bring shape and form to an individual psyche. The archetypes are the mechanism through which the psyche maintains its sense of balance and health. Compensating for any disruption to the natural state of the psyche, they ensure that the whole person, mind and body, stays healthy. In so doing they have a crucial role to play in guiding each individual on the quest for wholeness which Jung termed ‘individuation’.

The archetypes make their presence known in a variety of ways: they find their way into our dreams; they can alter our behaviour, physical and psychological. Such archetypal behaviour can suddenly escape from the unconscious when individuals are under pressure, or threatened and then they find themselves behaving in ways that they do not understand or are ‘out of character’. The affective power of the archetypes is experienced at the important moments of our life, at births, deaths, marriages and other occasions where the spontaneous outpouring of uncontrollable emotion tells us that this is unconscious material. However, and significantly, it is possible to come to know and recognize these archetypes through images, and these images belong at the same time to the inner world and the outer world. Put another way, the psyche is image.

…the psyche consists essentially of images. It is a series of images in the truest sense, not an accidental juxtaposition or sequence, but a structure that is throughout full of meaning and purpose; it is a ‘picturing’ of vital activities. And just as the material of the body that is ready for life has need of the psyche in order to be capable of life, so the psyche presupposes the living body in order that its images may live.⁷

The structure to which Jung alludes in the preceding quote is the structural make-up of the archetypes within the unconscious. He is at pains to note that these structures have meaning and purpose and put individuals in touch with their inner selves; they act as guides assisting in the realization that aspects of unconscious life can effect and affect our everyday relationships and engagement with the world. As such the image captures the psychological reality of a given situation and encapsulate the complex dynamics that arise from the interplay of archetypal forces and their relationship with consciousness as it tries to come to an informed understanding of what is at hand.

The inner image is a comp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Analytical Psychology – An Overview
• Chapter 1. Cinema as Illusion and Reality
• Chapter 2. Watching Films: The Affective Power of Cinema
• Chapter 3. Chinatown: Investigating Affect
• Chapter 4. A Jungian Approach to Television
• Chapter 5. Narcissism and the Alchemy of Advertising
• Chapter 6. Star Trek: Some Jungian Thoughts
• Chapter 7. Technology as Modern Myth and Magic
• Chapter 8. Identity and the Internet
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index