Film Reviews Guest Editorial

Dear Sir,

In his guest editorial announcing the inauguration of film reviews in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Glen Gabbard (1997, 78: 429-434) outlines several ‘psychoanalytic approaches’ to the interpretation of film. Absent from these approaches is the experiential world of the spectator. This omission is hardly astonishing because it is unusual in psychoanalytic studies of art for the writer to describe and analyze his/her emotions; instead, the film, or other work of art, seems to be regarded as a Rosetta stone to be deciphered. To be sure, there are exceptions, but they are infrequent. At the end of his Editorial, Gabbard does state that ‘audiences do not attend films merely to be entertained. They queue up at the local multiplex to encounter long-forgotten but still powerful memories that stem from universal developmental experiences. By confronting them at a distance in a darkened cinema, they have the opportunity to master these anxieties vicariously and leave enriched and relieved’. This observation may come as a surprise to those who have braved that ‘local multiplex’ and have heard some members of the audience weeping while others laughed and still others slept soundly. Apart from the questionable universality of this view, it does not suggest that the critic's reaction to the film may be relevant to an understanding of it.

Jacob Arlow's review of Bergman's Wild Strawberries, appearing in the same issue of the Journal (Arlow, 1997. The end of time: a psychoanalytic perspective on Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. Int. J. Psychoanal., 78: 595-599) is most apposite in this regard. He sensitively and carefully describes the sequences of the film, offering interpretations of many of them. He interprets Dr Borg's dreams, explicates the possible meanings of the characters' names, identifies identification with the aggressor, the primal scene, oedipal and pre-oedipal conflicts, etc. Only at the end of his contribution does Arlow menti