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.

Lebeau examines the long and uneven history of developments in modern art, science, and technology that brought pychoanalysis and the cinema together towards the end of the nineteenth century. She explores the subsequent encounters between the two: the seductions of psychoanalysis and cinema as converging, though distinct, ways of talking about dream and desire, image and illusion, shock, and sexuality. Beginning with Freud's encounter with the spectacle of hysteria on display in fin-de-siecle Paris, this study offers a detailed reading of the texts and concepts which generated the field of psychoanalytic film theory.

These fifteen carefully chosen essays by well-known scholars demonstrate the vitality and variety of psychoanalytic film criticism, as well as the crucial role feminist theory has played in its development. Among the films discussed are Duel in the Sun, The Best Years of Our Lives, Three Faces of Eve, Tender is the Night, Pandora's Box, Secrets of the Soul, and the works of Jacques Tourneur (director of The Cat People and other features).

"Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game offers a concise introduction to psychoanalytic film theory in jargon-free language and shows how this theory can be deployed to interpret Jean Renoir's classic film"--

Psychoanalysis and Hidden Narrative in Film proposes a way of constructing hidden psychological narratives of popular film and novels. Instead of offering interpretations of classic films, Trevor C. Pederson recognizes that the psychoanalytic tradition began with making sense of the seemingly inconsequential. Here he turns his attention to popular films like Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys (1987). While masterworks like Psycho (1960) are not the object of interpretation, Hitchcock’s film is used as a skeleton key. The revelation that Norman Bates’ character had been his mother all along, suggests a framework of reading a film as having symptom characters who are excised to create a latent plot. The symptom character's behavior or inter-relations are then transcribed to an ego character. This is a shift in the tradition of literary doubling from hermeneutic intuition to a formal methodology that generates data for the unconscious. Pederson continues the project of unifying competing schools into a single model of mind and offers clinical examples from his own practice for all its terms. Psychodynamic techniques that emphasize the importance of working with the body, the id, and the ubiquity of repetition are introduced. A return to Freud’s structural theory, in which complexes are anchored in the stages of superego development, is used to carefully plot and explain the social nature of the superego and its relation to authority in society (secondary narcissism) and the otherworldly (primary narcissism). Discrete phases of superego development and their ties to both the social and the id revive the grand promises of classical psychoanalysis to link with every field in the humanities. Psychoanalysis and Hidden Narrative in Film will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as scholars of film studies and literature interested in using a psychoanalytic approach and ideas in their work.

In Western culture, the psychoanalysis that has guided popular psychology for almost a century is now on the retreat. Better equipped with proven results, cognitive and evolutionary psychology has driven psychoanalysis out of the spotlight. In cultural and film studies, however, the debate between cognitive sciences and psychoanalysis remains contentious. This volume explores this state of things by examining criticism of 18 films, juxtaposing them with cognitive-based films to reveal the flaws in the psychoanalytical concepts. It pays particular attention to simulation theory, the concept that narratives "learned" from films could work in human minds as simulations for solutions to particular problems. By introducing the idea of narrative stimulation to film studies, this work argues for a different method of film critique, encouraging further research into this nascent field.

This book applies ecolinguistics and psychoanalysis to explore how films fictionalising environmental disasters provide spectacular warnings against the dangers of environmental apocalypse, while highlighting that even these apparently environmentally friendly films can still facilitate problematic real-world changes in how people treat the environment. Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis argues that these films exploit cinema’s inherent Cartesian grammar to construct texts in which not only small groups of protagonist survivors, but also vicarious spectators, pleasurably transcend the fictionalised destruction. The ideological nature of the ‘lifeboats’ on which these survivors escape, moreover, is accompanied by additional elements that constitute contemporary Cartesian subjectivity, such as class and gender binaries, restored nuclear families, individual as opposed to social responsibilities for disasters, and so on. The book conducts extensive analyses of these processes, before considering alternative forms of filmmaking that might avoid the dangers of this existing form of storytelling. The book’s new ecosophy and film theory establishes that Cartesian subjectivity is an environmentally destructive ‘symptom’ that everyday linguistic activities like watching films reinforce. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of film studies, literary studies (specifically ecocriticism), cultural studies, ecolinguistics, and ecosophy.

The experience of watching films – entertaining, moving, instructive, frightening or exciting as they may be – can be enriched by the opportunity to reflect upon them from unconventional perspectives.Psychoanalytic Reflections on Film: Moving Images offers its readers in an accessible language one such viewpoint, informed by Andrea Sabbadini's psychoanalytic insights and therapeutic experience. Using a psychoanalytic interpretative approach, some twenty-five important feature films are discussed as the artistic vehicles of new, unsuspected meanings. The first chapter looks at films which represent psychoanalytic work itself, having therapists and their patients as their main characters. The remaining five chapters cover movies on themes of central concern to analytic theorists and clinicians, such as childhood and adolescent development, and varieties of intimate relationships among adults. The latter include romantic love and its disturbing association to death fantasies; eroticism and prostitution; and voyeuristic desire – a significant phenomenon in this context given its parallels with the activity of watching films. Andrea Sabbadini's psychoanalytic approach, which explores the part played by unconscious factors in shaping the personality and behaviour of film characters, is used to interpret their internal world and the emotional conflicts engendered by the vicissitudes they live through. The book is completed by a filmography and biographical notes on film directors. Psychoanalytic Reflections on Film presents the relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis as a complex one. These two most different of cultural phenomena are shown to share a wish on the part of their practitioners to uncover profound truths about the human condition, and to provide a language with which to describe them. Going beyond futile ‘psycho-historical’ attempts to analyse filmmakers through their products, or a superficial application of psychoanalytic concepts to film, Sabbadini shows how both cinema and psychoanalysis can benefit from a meaningful interdisciplinary dialogue between them. The book will be of special interest to practicing psychoanalysts and students, scholars and historians of film studies.

This study explores the model derived from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, via Marxism and semiotics, of looking at film. It retraces the steps of film theory from ideological criticism of the late ‘60s to spectator studies in 1988 when the book was originally published. Psychoanalysis enables a discussion of the cinema’s role as a social and political force and this book enters a discourse of the politics of representation. Reconstructing discussion of basic issues, the book addresses our instincts and defences in reacting to cinema, the similarity between mental processes and cinematic technique, narrative techniques and the ‘cinematic apparatus’. Importantly, the book concerns itself with the concept of ideology and how the filmviewing experience engages the spectator in a complex net of stimuli presenting representations of an ideal world and the effect of this within film studies.