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The Freud Museum conference on Adolescent Phantasies and the Horror Film Genre took place at the National Film Theatre on 18 March 1995. The audience was composed largely of teachers, film theorists and cultural historians. There was apparently little interest in the topic among psychotherapists. Despite this, I believe the conference addressed a significant area of study, and I would like to offer the following comments to indicate why.
There is no doubt that the contemplation of horror is disturbing to many people. In the first place, horror stories frighten their audiences and produce a visceral reaction: thrills and excitement for adolescents, nausea and revulsion for most adults. Under these circumstances it is all too easy to confuse real horror with horror stories and fail to give due consideration to either psychic reality or narrative form. The techniques of horror stories exploit this propensity to the full.
A second reason for our disturbance may be that the existence of the horror genre upsets the distinction we are apt to maintain between the normal and the pathological. Clearly there is something ‘pathological’ about the avid consumption of horror, and yet it is quite normal in many cultures, including our own. For the purposes of the present remarks the distinction is not particularly relevant. The issue is whether the films can tell us something about adolescent psychology.
Psychotherapists, however, rarely deal with film material in their work. They are generally used to hearing about their patient's phantasies rather than seeing them portrayed, and the visual impact of film is in many ways quite alien to the culture of psychoanalysis. Although his ideas were changed to some extent by the work of Melanie Klein, it is true to say that Freud's legacy of dealing with phantasies as either a structure (as in primal phantasies) or a narrative (as in day-dreams) missed out the bodily effects and experiences which often accompany them. For instance, a young ma