Analytical Psychology and Cinema

For a long time, Jung had been an unwelcome name at film and media conferences, short of unmentionable. Seen as conservative, apolitical, antiscientific, bizarre and obscure, Jungian theory has been ignored by cultural studies for decades. Only the idea of the archetype has more or less managed to establish itself as a critical term. As one young (and a little overambitious) film scholar told me recently, with a smile, ‘Jung? To analyse films? Interesting idea; never heard of it’. In a way, using Jung to analyse film narratives is an equivalent to thinking outside the box—to challenge the established norm.

All the while, in the past 20 years or so, the film industry itself has been influenced by Jungian and post-Jungian ideas and concepts. Christopher Vogler's book, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (1998/2007), became the widely-acclaimed cookbook for creating ‘perfect’, commercially viable narratives securing large audiences. True, Jungian ideas, particularly coupled with Joseph Campbell's structuralist analysis of fairytale motifs, make for a powerful tool of psychological influence which the Hollywood machine can use to secure big financial returns. ‘A narrative cookbook’ is the kind of phenomenon that is capable of attracting more attention to Jungian psychology than years of academic monographs and scholarly articles. Despite its controversy, Vogler's book demonstrates the practical aspect of analytical psychology—and primarily, via the concept of individuation, its applicability to human experience.

Even though Jungian and post-Jungian concepts are still new to most academics and film critics, things are gradually changing, and Jungian film studies is a now a fast-growing academic field. It has taken two main directions: narrative analysis (John Izod, Terrie Waddell, Helena Bassil-Morozow, Catriona Miller) and phenomenological criticism (Luke Hockley, Greg Singh). One of the pioneers of the field, the filmmaker and