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Traditionally, Jungian film studies come second to the more established discipline of psychoanalytic film studies. Freud and Lacan dominate, whilst Jung has been confined to the shadows, according to the cultural philosopher and film scholar Helena Bassil-Morozow who identifies an intriguing anomaly:
Seen as conservative, apolitical, antiscientific, bizarre and obscure, Jungian theory has been ignored by cultural studies for decades [whilst] the film industry itself has been influenced by Jungian and post-Jungian ideas and concepts. (2015, p. 132)
Bassil-Morozow points out that Christopher Vogler's popular book The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (1998), with its focus on individuation, is widely viewed as providing valuable assistance to Hollywood and other filmmakers in their pursuit of box office successes: his insights, it is acknowledged, contribute to the creation of compelling narratives because they address the collective unconscious. Bassil-Morozow states that Jungian film studies are now a fast-growing field, bifurcating broadly into narrative analysis (John Izod, Terrie Waddell, Helena Bassil-Morozow, Catriona Miller) and phenomenological criticism (Luke Hockley, Greg Singh) whilst another major voice in the field, the filmmaker and theorist Christopher Hauke, combines both (Bassil-Morozow, 2015, pp. 132-133).
These developments are the context and backdrop for Ruth Netzer's A Jungian Perspective on the Therapist–Patient Relationship in Film: Cinema as Our Therapist. Netzer, an Israeli Jungian analyst, clinical psychologist, poet, painter, and photographer, who teaches at the School of Jungian Psychotherapy in Seminar HaKibbutzim College, Israel, views cinema as a contemporary alternative to literature and ancient myth. Her chapters cover: “Psychological aspects of cinema”; “Therapist–Patient relationships: Love and death”; “Archetypes activated in therapist–patient relationships”; “Therapists as mirrored in cinema”; “Cinema as a ‘chief super