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Helena Bassil-Morozow's scholarly Tim Burton: The Monster and the Crowd argues that Burton's visually stimulating films reflect an attitude that is all about ‘becoming’ or, in Jungian language, the process of individuation. Quoting Christopher Hauke, she defines individuation as ‘the urge found in all living things to persist in becoming themselves’. She draws also on Jung, Erich Neumann, Jolande Jacobi, and Joe Henderson to make the point that the path of individuation is marked with specific archetypal milestones, and she organizes her analysis of Burton's films with archetypal themes—the child, the monster, the superhero, the genius, the maniac, and the monstrous society. Throughout, it is the premise of Bassil-Morozow that Burton is an accomplished ‘auteur of the symbol’, one who uses the symbolic language of the unconscious, comfortably able to portray a feeling, an emotion, an unconscious dreamlike state through cinematic imagery. Burton's use of mythological motifs and his ‘unconfined, flexible approach’ pull viewers into realms where they feel part of something universal while at the same time able to experience their individual psychic projections through screen images.
While not a psychobiography, the book links Burton's ability to provide oxymoronic material with psychological depth and a schematic pop style to information gleaned from his biographies and interviews. Burton, Bassil-Morozow explains, uses allegorical