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Psychoanalysts love film. We discuss it in conference settings; we recommend film in classrooms; we find abundant parallels to our patients, and they bring insights into sessions from the previous weekend's film going. Some of us know French New Wave; others know the more recent and widely penetrating feminist film theories; we may be conversant in auteur theory; currently, we might read the philosopher and cultural studies icon, Slavoj Žižek, who holds sway over the latest iteration of Lacanian film studies.
No cohesive psychoanalytic film theory has survived following the political upheaval in film academia and journalism that ousted its Freudian conventions in the 1960s: Ever since, European film studies have been divided, much like the psychoanalytic universe itself. The thesis of Embodied Encounter is to both legitimize various psychoanalytic theoretical paradigms as vital to film theory and to apply them to an examination of embodiment and the unconscious in film (p. 3), an earnest but confusingly circuitous goal.
This resulting idiosyncratic volume of papers is from an event by the same name that its editor, Agnieszka Piotrowska, a Polish émigré, schooled in England and a documentarian and educator there, arranged in 2012 at the Freud Museum, London. “Embodiment,” perhaps intentionally, is not defined in any consistent way and left to the imaginative resources of participants. At times it means the Lacan Symbolic, at others it is an affective or physical experience of the viewer, and in other examples it is a character's personification. However, the papers infrequently represent a clearly somatic/emotionally-experienced communication between self and other, whether film and director, viewing audience or critic of any stripe.
What results in this book is a polylogue of theoretical languages from psychoanalytic and film academies, respectively, mainly Lacanian with Jung, Winnicott and Bion also represented. Noticeably absent are any American psychoanalytic school