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There already exists a rich literature on numerous aspects of the relationship psychoanalysis and psychiatry entertain with cinema. Some of it ‘applies’ to film criticism theories and concepts used by mental health practitioners in their clinical work; other texts explore similarities and differences between analytic and cinematic languages; still others refer to fictional narratives and characters developed by filmmakers in order to gain a better understanding of various forms of psychopathology. Original and difficult to categorize, A Psychoanalyst's Visions is built in and out of a number of different, yet cleverly interlaced, areas of discourse, showing its author's flexible approach and the breadth of his knowledge. An Italian psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and himself a respected filmmaker of several ‘shorts’, Dr Giuseppe Riefolo emerges here as a competent clinician and a passionate connoisseur of cinema and its language.
Each of this short book's 23 chapters directly refers to one film which had an emotional and intellectual impact on the author. We are given a synopsis of each of them in the last 12 pages, but the films (all but one made between 2002 and 2006) are not otherwise reviewed, or placed in any specific theoretical or historical context. It is perhaps significant that, even if the reader has not watched the films under examination here, he or she can still follow the author's considerations, as if those films, often treated as if they were an analysand's fantasies, only existed as convenient opportunities to provide the themes of as many chapters: on ‘Changes’ (Tim Burton's Big