Images that Bind and Dissolve: Childhood Trauma, Creative Vitality and the Mass Media Screen

This paper explores the relationship between childhood trauma, creative vitality, and mass media film. Looking back on an earlier period of my career, I offer an account of my work with a father and his 5-year-old child traumatized by violence in the home and by separations from a primary caregiver. The child's capacity to enlist creative expression to represent traumatic material was initially inaccessible, fused through parental identifications to an acute and fearful sense that affective vitality brings disintegration and loss. Creative expression and affective vitality are herein considered inseparably bound. I provide a retrospective account of the significance of the film Frozen for this child and our work together. I then offer theoretical considerations about the function of film for traumatized individuals, binding traumatic residues, as well as accessing, stimulating, and engaging creative-expressive and meaning-making capacities. I consider how the screen is experienced in unconscious fantasy as a face, a transitional object, and interface, which provides creative, meaningful contact and subjective coherence. Finally, with the help of more recent clinical vignettes, I limn three qualities of object relations pertaining to mass media of the screen—the good, the bad and the ugly.