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Each of the films, Shutter Island , Inception and Memento , is influenced by psychoanalytic thinking. Each involves, to some degree or another, matters of consciousness and levels of consciousness, subjectivity, subjecthood and the degree to which the subject is unitary, and the ‘double consciousness’ characteristic of schizoid states or conditions. The films echo early Freudian concerns with the topology of the mind and the existence and treatment of hysterical symptoms.
In Shutter Island the development of new tranquillizing drugs in the 1950s allows the psychiatrists at a mental hospital to try a novel treatment for a man who has defensively split himself into two different people and can find no way of integrating these separate personae. In Inception a group of people specializing in a form of espionage, that is a caricature of psychoanalysis, spend their time extracting secret information from their ‘target's’ deep unconscious, through dreams. The meaning of the film's title is that they can also implant information into the deep unconscious without the person being aware. In many ways these processes, of ‘extraction’ and ‘inception’, are paranoid fears long associated with psychoanalysis. You can have your best-kept secrets, or your creativity, stolen by the analyst, or the analyst can coerce you into thinking something that you did not think before, by operating directly on your unconscious mind. In Memento the whole problematic of hysteria is raised - whether someone who has suffered a severe head trauma and may therefore be suffering from a physical medical condition called anterograde amnesia might actually be suffering from a psychological condition.
I shall consider these aspects of the films in this paper but I believe there is a unifying theme to the three films that can be developed by looking at the film from the perspective of Fairbairn's object relations theory and, in particular, his concept of the moral defence. I will argue that t