Screen, Culture, Psyche illuminates recent developments in Jungian modes of media analysis, and illustrates how psychoanalytic theories have been adapted to allow for the interpretation of films and television programmes, employing Post-Jungian methods in the deep reading of a whole range of films. Readings of this kind can demonstrate the way that some films bear the psychological projections not only of their makers but of their audience, and assess the manner in which films engage the writer’s own psyche. Seeking to go beyond existing theories, John Izod explores the question of whether Jungian screen analysis can work for ordinary filmgoers - can what functions for the scholar be said to be true for people without a background in Jung’s ideas? Through detailed readings of a number of films and programmes, John Izod builds on the work previously done by Jungian film analysts, and moves on to contemplate the level of audience engagement. Offering deep readings of films directed by Kubrick and Bernardo Bertolucci, as well as satirical comedy, documentaries and twenty-first century Westerns, the book explores the extent to which they manage to make the psychological impact on spectators that films of a similar kind have done on Jungian writers. The author concludes that the screen texts with the best likelihood of impacting the culture of the audience through their collective psychological force fall at opposite ends of the size and budget range: highly personal documentaries, and the most affecting of mainstream genre movies. This innovative text will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and therapists, as well as students and scholars of film with an interest in understanding how screen products work psychologically to engage the viewer.

Jungian film studies is a fast-growing academic field, but Jungian and post-Jungian concepts are still new to many academics and film critics. Helena Bassil-Morozow and Luke Hockley present Jungian Film Studies: The Essential Guide, the first book to bring together all the different strands, issues and arguments in the discipline, and guide the reader through the various ways in which Jungian psychology can be applied to moving images. Bassil-Morozow and Hockley cover a range of Jungian concepts including the collective unconscious, archetypes, the individuation process, alchemy, and signs and symbols, showing how they can be used to discuss the core cinematic issues such as narrative structure, gender, identity, genre, authorship, and phenomenology. The authors argue that, as a place where the unconscious and conscious meet, cinema offers the potential for imagery that is psychologically potent, meaningful, and that plays a role in our personal psychological development. This much-needed book, which bridges the space between Jungian concepts and traditional film theory, will be essential reading for scholars and students of Analytical Psychology, psychoanalysis, Jungian film studies, media, film and cultural studies, psychosocial psychology and clinical psychology. It will also appeal to analytical psychologists, psychotherapists and readers with an interest in film analysis.

Jungian Theory for Storytellers is a toolkit for anyone using Jungian archetypes to create stories in fiction, TV, film, video games, documentaries, poetry, and many other media. It contains a detailed classification of the archetypes, with relevant examples, and explains how they work in different types of narratives. Importantly, Bassil-Morozow explores archetypes and their significance in characterization, individuation, plot and story-building. Bassil-Morozow also presents an overview of Jung’s thoughts on creativity and other Jungian concepts, including the unconscious, ego, persona and self and the individuation process, and shows how they are linked to conflict. The book provides an explanation of relevant Jungian terms for a non-Jungian audience and introduces the idea of the hero’s journey, with examples included throughout. Accessibly written yet academic, both practical and engaging, and written with a non-Jungian audience in mind, Jungian Theory for Storytellers is an ideal source for writers and screenwriters of all backgrounds, including academics and teachers, who want to use Jungian theory in their work or are seeking to understand relevant Jungian ideas.

Since Jung and Film was first published in 2001, Jungian writing on the moving image in film and television has accelerated. Jung and Film II: The Return provides new contributions from authors across the globe willing to tackle the broader issues of film production and consumption, the audience and the place of film culture in our lives. As well as chapters dealing with particular film makers such as Maya Derren and films such as Birth, The Piano, The Wrestler and Breaking the Wave, there is also a unique chapter co-written by documentary film-maker Tom Hurvitz and New York Jungian analyst Margaret Klenck. Other areas of discussion include: the way in which psychological issues come under scrutiny in many movies the various themes that concern Jungian writers on film how Jungian ideas on psychological personality types can be applied in fresh ways to analyse a variety of characters. The book also includes a glossary to help readers with Jungian words and concepts. Jung and Film II is not only a welcome companion to the first volume, it is an important stand- alone work essential for all academics and students of analytical psychology as well as film, media and cultural studies.

This book tackles the broader issues of film production and consumption, the audience and the place of film culture in our lives.

Cinema has the capacity to enflame our passions, to arouse our pity, to inspire our love. Feeling Film is a book that examines the emotional encounters found in contemporary popular cinema cultures. Examining melodrama, film noir, comic book franchises, cult indie movies and romantic comedy within the context of a Jungian-informed psychology and contemporary movements in film-philosophy, this book considers the various kinds of feelings engendered by our everyday engagements with cinema. Greg Singh questions the popular idea of what cinema is, and considers what happens during the anticipation and act of watching a movie, through to the act of sharing our feelings about them, the reviewing process and repeat-viewing practices. Feeling Film does this through a critique of purely textual approaches, instead offering a model which emphasises lived, warm (embodied and inhabited) psychological relationships between the viewer and the viewed. It extends the narrative action of cinema beyond the duration of the screening into realms of anticipation and afterlife, in particular providing insight into the tertiary and participatory practices afforded through rich media engagement. In rethinking the everyday, co-productive relationship between viewer and viewed from this perspective, Feeling Film reinstates the importance of feelings as a central concern for film theory. What emerges from this study is a re-engagement of the place of emotion, affect and feeling in film theory and criticism. In reconsidering the duration of the cinematic encounter, Feeling Film makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the inter-subjective relationship between viewer and viewed. It takes post-Jungian criticism into the realms of post-cinema technologies and reignites the dialogue between depth psychology and the study of images as they appear to, and for, us. This book will make essential reading for those interested in the relationship between film and aspects of depth psychology, film and philosophy students at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate levels, film and cinema academics and cinephiles.

Through a theoretical and practical exploration of Jungian and post-Jungian concepts surrounding image, this book moves beyond the visual scope of imagery to consider the presence and expression of music and sound, as well as how the psyche encounters expanded images – archetypal, personal or cultural – on both conscious and unconscious levels. By closely examining music in film, Nagari considers music’s complementary, enhancing, meaningful, and sometimes disruptive, contribution to expressive images. Chapters present a Jungian approach to music in film, highlighting how ‘music-image’ functions both independently and in conjunction with the visual image, and suggesting further directions in areas of research including music therapy and autism. Divided into three cumulative parts, Part I explores the Jungian psychological account of the music-image; Part II combines theory with practice in analysing how the auditory image works with the visual to create the ‘film as a whole’ experience; and Part III implements a specific understanding of three individual film cases of different genres, eras and styles as psychologically scrutinised ‘case histories’. Music as Image will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of applied psychoanalysis and Jungian psychology, music, film and cultural studies. With implications for music therapy and other art-based therapies, it will also be relevant for practising psychotherapists.

Italian neo-realism has inspired film audiences and fascinated critics and film scholars for decades. This book offers an original analysis of the movement and its defining films from the perspective of the cultural unconscious. Combining a Jungian reading with traditional theorizations of film and national identity, Filming the Nation reinterprets familiar images of well-known masterpieces by Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica and Luchino Visconti and introduces some of their less renowned yet equally significant films. Providing an illuminating analysis of film images across a particularly traumatic and complex historical period, Filming the Nation revisits the concept of national identity and its ‘construction’ from a perspective that combines cultural, psychoanalytic and post-Jungian theories. As such this book will be essential reading for all students and scholars of film and psychoanalysis.

Loss is an inescapable reality of life, and individuals need to develop a capacity to grieve in order to mature and live life to the full. Yet most western movie audiences live in cultures that do not value this necessary process and filmgoers finding themselves deeply moved by a particular film are often left wondering why. In Cinema as Therapy, John Izod and Joanna Dovalis set out to fill a gap in work on the conjunction of grief, therapy and cinema. Looking at films including Million Dollar Baby, The Son’s Room, Birth and The Tree of Life, Cinema as Therapy offers an understanding of how deeply emotional life can be stirred at the movies. Izod and Dovalis note that cinema is a medium which engages people in a virtual dialogue with their own and their culture’s unconscious, more deeply than is commonly thought. By analysing the meaning of each film and the root cause of the particular losses featured, the authors demonstrate how our experiences in the movie theatre create an opportunity to prepare psychologically for the inevitable losses we must all eventually face. In recognising that the movie theatre shares symbolic features with both the church and the therapy room, the reader sees how it becomes a sacred space where people can encounter the archetypal and ease personal suffering through laughter or tears, without inhibition or fear, to reach a deeper understanding of themselves. Cinema as Therapy will be essential reading for therapists, students and academics working in film studies and looking to engage with psychological studies in depth as well as filmgoers who want to explore their relationship with the screen. The book includes a glossary of Jungian and Freudian terms which enhances the clarity of the text and the understanding of the reader.

Tim Burton’s films are well known for being complex and emotionally powerful. In this book, Helena Bassil-Morozow employs Jungian and post-Jungian concepts of unconscious mental processes along with film semiotics, analysis of narrative devices and cinematic history, to explore the reworking of myth and fairytale in Burton’s gothic fantasy world. The book explores the idea that Burton’s lonely, rebellious ‘monstrous’ protagonists roam the earth because they are unable to fit into the normalising tendencies of society and become part of ‘the crowd’. Divided into six chapters the book considers the concept of the archetype in various settings focusing on: the child the monster the superhero the genius the maniac the monstrous society. Tim Burton: The Monster and the Crowd offers an entirely fresh perspective on Tim Burton’s works. The book is essential reading for students and scholars of film or Jungian psychology, as well as anyone interested in critical issues in contemporary culture. It will also be of great help to those fans of Tim Burton who have been searching for a profound academic analysis of his works.