Cinematic Techniques and Psychic Mechanisms - Psychoanalysis and Film

Let us start off by thinking in pictures. Here is an evocative (and provocative) still image from the front page of a recent New York Times (Figure 1). Please take a look and just react to it, in whatever way you wish.

Wherever your reactions led you, you told yourself a story. Our brains are wired to able to do this.

The image as we are experiencing it is like a metaphor; numerous ideas are condensed in it that we can “unpack” in our analysis. If this were not a still image, but a series of images, we might, for example, have frames of the poppies from this point of view, then perhaps the sound of helicopters off camera, followed by shots of helicopters traveling across the sky; this would be a kind of metonymic series, a montage sequence. We might see the large foregrounded image of the poppies as a reminder of the significance of the drug trade in the financing of terrorism, and the point of view of the shot, as though we were lying on the ground behind the poppies, as suggesting the vantage point of a sniper about to open fire, or a child, hiding from the violence.

What tools of mind have we made use of in digesting this image? This is what we will explore. But first, I offer you a very brief history of psychoanalytic art criticism.

We start, of course, with Freud, whose quest was to demonstrate that psychoanalysis, as a theory and as a clinical practice, could make a major contribution, not only to the treatment of functional or hysterical illnesses, but could take its place as a general psychology which would illuminate the working of the human mind in all its infinite variety. As his writings show, he moved well beyond the pathology of neurosis to demonstrate that the symptoms of hysterical illness were related to the dreams and daydreams of the non-neurotic adult, as well as many other phenomena - perversions, slips of the tongue, jokes, the waking play and fantasy life of children.

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