The Celluloid Couch: Representations of Psychotherapy in Recent Cinema

To most people, I suspect, psychoanalysis in the cinema means Woody Allen, whether the many jokes about his own lengthy analysis or the depictions of psychoanalytic treatment in films such as Annie Hall and, more recently, Another Woman and Alice . Yet the figure of the psychoanalyst or psychotherapist turns up in a surprising number of mainstream films, surprising given that psychotherapy remains very much a minority activity, whether one is speaking of practitioners or patients. Such figures may often be marginal but in several recent films (here I am talking of films mainly from the start of the 1980s) they, and the process of analysis or therapy, are central. But let me begin with a question. As someone who practises psychotherapy, have you ever done any of the following: eaten sweets from a jar while seeing a patient? shouted at a young patient whose brother had died in a tragic accident? thrown a book at a patient's relative? informed on a patient's political views to the plice? The questions are, of course, absurd but I ask them because psychotherapists have been shown as doing all these (and more) in several recent (and not so recent) mainstream films. Film psychotherapists, it seems, are by definition eccentric. This, it would appear, is a qualification for the job. Like the belted raincoat, cigarette and drink of the private detective of days gone by, the psychotherapist's hallmark is his or her varying degree of weirdness. In Duet for One , Dr Louis Feldman (Max von Sydow) conducts psychoanalytic sessions from behind a desk while eating cough sweets from a large jar (even when he has no cough) and cuts articles from newspapers during a session. The caricature is matched in its risibility only by the portrayal in the same film by Julie Andrews and Rupert Everett of acclaimed concert violinists. (This film, with its parallels with the life of Jacqueline Du Pré, carries a particular resonance in that it is widely known that Du Pré did in fact seek analysis