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The psychoanalytic experience is very hard to convey to someone who has not been through it. Words alone fail to capture its complexity, its subtlety, and its emotional upheaval. The subject matter is elusive, like a dream that initially appears lucid and comprehensible, but rapidly fades in clarity and logic as we try to recall it.
With “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” Woody Allen gives us a magnificent and precise allegory for the psychoanalytic experience. Other Allen films allow us to know the conflict, torment, and pain of neurotic suffering. “Purple Rose” lets us share the full course of its treatment and resolution through a process that has often confused, mystified, and defied any palpable sense of understanding. This creative allegory, whether or not so intended by Mr. Allen, offers a tangible visual image that can illuminate what has been obscure in psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis is a treatment for emotional disorders that aims at bringing into awareness deeply buried, inaccessible feelings—the unconscious feelings—that shape and sometimes deform our lives. One important clue to the nature of these unavailable emotions is the flow of feelings and fantasies that the patient develops toward the analyst during the course of the treatment. To the extent that the patient knows little about the analyst's real life or emotions, his or her perceptions and fantasies regarding the analyst will derive in good part from experiences with important persons from the past, most often parents and siblings. Freud called this part of the analytic experience the transference, because feelings initially directed toward persons in the patient's past are transferred to the analyst, and he likened the process to the projection of images onto a blank screen.1 To facilitate the development