You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Film after Jung represents an interesting and thought-provoking attempt to ‘take Jungian film theorizing to a brand new level’ to quote Christopher Hauke in his foreword to the book by Greg Singh, senior lecturer in Media Studies at Buckinghamshire New University.
Whilst both film theory and analytical psychology are critically concerned with images and whilst both can make important contributions to each other's fields, nevertheless as Singh writes, ‘the languages spoken by film studies and analytical psychology are very different, and at times contradictory’ (p. 23) and it is exactly this need to overcome this difficulty that Singh is attempting to address.
The book has essentially three rather different aims: firstly, to provide a critical historiography of film theory through the use of Jungian and post-Jungian theoretical concepts in an attempt to locate post-Jungian approaches within the context of the theoretical traditions of the discipline of film studies and to provide a critique of the place of Jungian film studies within this history; secondly, to apply certain key Jungian concepts such as the image, contrasexuality and synchronicity to film theory; and thirdly, to discuss ‘particularly pressing themes in the history of theorizing about film which are of most relevance to Jungian scholars and practitioners’ (p. 5).
If film studies can be loosely categorized in terms of their dominant perspective—historical, theoretical and critical—Jungian film studies have often tended to confound these levels and to concentrate only on the critical approach because of its affinity with analysis; in this sense, Singh addresses an important imbalance in this field.
One of the central issues of the book is the problem of meaning, not so much in the sense of what film narratives and images mean, which only too often can lead to a content-laden reductive interpretation of films, but more in the sense of meaningfulness, ‘how they come to be seen as meaningful in a sensible, pre-