“Film has been booming in psychoanalysis since 1995”, reads the first sentence of her book, and the author is playing a decisive part in this development in the German-speaking world. Back in November 1994, she published the special issue on psychoanalysis and film in the journal Psyche, and her contribution summarized psychoanalytic film theory, as well as film discussions by analysts available up to then (Zeul, 1994). In her current book, Mechthild Zeul further elaborates her own theory, which she then applies in the second part by interpreting eight films.

There is an ever-increasing number of publications on individual films in many journals and presentations of this kind at psychoanalytic conferences,