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Psychoanalysis and film were both born in 1895. In Vienna on the early morning of July 24, Sigmund Freud had the dream of Irma's injection that marked his first step along “the royal road to the unconscious” (Gay, 1988). On an October evening in Berlin that same year, Max Skladanowsky became the first to project moving pictures on a screen to a paying audience. This was followed in December by the commercial debut in Paris of the Cinématographe invented by the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis. The similarity between dreaming and watching a film has often been noted. And in this respect it is important to note that the documentary emphasis of Lumière was soon surpassed in popularity by the fantastical, dreamlike entertainments produced by former magician George Méliès. Apart from the coincidence of their birth and their intercourse with dreams, however, psychoanalysis and film also share certain important characteristics. Both are artifacts of the scientific and industrial age. Both are concerned with what the mind sees. Both treat time as highly malleable and the unconscious as timeless. Both are concerned with tangible reality—psychological and photographic—but both are also vitally concerned with the intangible.
The psychoanalytic perspective is also in harmony with the deconstructionist emphasis on the variety of meanings inherent in the text of a film. This multiplicity of meanings is due to the necessary distinction between words and meaning. It is also due to the fact that the meaning of texts is dependent on other texts and to the readings brought to them, what Roland Barthes named “intertextuality,” rather than a single meaning created by the author and confirmed by the reader. Interpretation of a film is therefore “dialogical” by nature and not just a function of the imposition of meaning by its creator. In its understanding of ambivalence, in the dialogical nature of its praxis, and in the ambiguity and overdetermination of symbols in the dreams it analy