Visible Mind: Movies, modernity and the unconscious

In film, as in no other medium, we can actually see the behavior of the archetype; in life, we know her far more indirectly, as moods, impulses, symptoms, and as a shape-shifting personage in our dreams … In film, we can see the anima figure over time, in a more or less stable guise, at her strange task of mediating the fate of a protagonist. (Beeb

Myth, Mind, and the Screen: Understanding the Heroes of Our Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

‘the image on the screen; the image that arises from the act of interpretation; and the third image that comes about as the result of an individual's largely unconscious relationship with a film’

The movies are far more efficient than the theatre: they are less restricted, they are able to produce symbols to show the collective unconscious, since their methods of presentation are so unlimited. (Jung 1984: 12)

One analyst told me of a client who grew up in a family where no one was allowed to watch anything except cartoons. It was as if the whole family had not grown up. When she was depressed, the client watched cartoons all day. She eventually confessed how she would be terrified to watch a romantic comedy; the idea of going to the video store and watc

Beebe, J. and Apperson, V. (2008) The Presence of the Feminine in Film. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

By looking into the cinema screen, viewers also look into themselves and in the midway point between their bodies and the screen they experience the third image. As a result it is quite possible for viewers to suddenly have an intensely personal … reaction to a film that others in the audience do not have.

‘Love-Life: Using Films in the Interpretation of Gender Within Analysis’, in C. Hauke and I. Alister (eds) (2001) op. cit.

One analyst reported a variety of views of the film On Golden Pond (Rydell, 1981) starring Katherine Hepburn, and with Jane Fonda playing the daughter of her real life father, Henry. One person said it was about an older couple at the end of their life;