Previous applications of psychoanalysis to the cinema have broadly fallen into two camps: the Freudian approach, where the film is treated like a dream-text and interpreted as such, or where Freudian notions of dream and psychopathology are used to represent aspects of the drama; and Lacanian approaches, where the problem of the subject is central.

The development of Lacan-inspired psychoanalytic responses to cinema has been hegemonic. Since Lacan criticized and disagreed with the ‘British’ object-relations theories developed by Klein, Fairbairn and Winnicott, one would not expect the following applications of object-relations theory to cinema to be readily received into this discourse. However, the treatment of the film as text, like the notion of the unconscious being structured as a language, has its limitations, not least of which is the obscurity of the work that has emerged. Simplicity for its own sake is not to be recommended, but attempting to use aspects of the most widely practised forms of psychoanalysis in Britain for making a