‘Loving the Alien?’ A response to John Izod's ‘Active imagination and the analysis of film’

I welcome John Izod's paper as an attempt to open up Jungian interest in film (and narrative visual imagery generally) and hope that it will encourage other authors, from both clinical and academic backgrounds, to apply themselves to what has been called the greatest art form of the 20^th Century. I was particularly interested in his attempts to combine both Jungian and psychoanalytic object relations ideas in his teasing out of the meaning of film. I am pleased to have been asked to respond to his paper, though I do so as a clinician rather than as a film critic - this will inevitably slant my response. I am aware that, as a result, I will be unable to do justice to the richness of his paper, but I hope that I can highlight some points of interest.

The paper begins by looking at the Gabbards' reading of the science-fiction horror film Alien and takes up their version of a Kleinian approach by citing their suggestion that the viewer of a film has the opportunity to take part in a ‘constructive psychological process’. After outlining their reading of Alien, he makes the observation that in their model ‘it is not altogether clear whether people actually begin to take control of their anxiety-producing phantasy material, or merely live through it again knowing they are safe’. He suggests that a more productive way of addressing the question is to approach the viewer's experience as though it were a form of ‘symbol play’ and with this we turn rather swiftly away from the neo-Kleinians to Jung and Winnicott. I rather fear that, like the Alien itself, they cannot be so easily removed from the scene. I'd like to address this issue first, and then move on to the question of active imagination.

In contrast to the Gabbards' optimistic view of the meaning and impact of the Alien sequence of films there is another reading, one which is much more critical and which addresses itself to areas similar to those of Izod. Christoph Hering's paper, The problem of the Alien: emotional mast