Film and Culture: Art Works

Over the last year I have become Editor of the Film and Culture section of the JAP. Small but significant, this section appears twice a year in the April and November issues. It provides an opportunity to publish peer-reviewed, short articles (usually 500-2000 words, up to an occasional maximum of 4000 words) with a focus on filmic and modern culture in the context of the clinical practice of analytical psychology and psychoanalysis. Non-clinical articles focusing on theoretical or thematic concerns may be published alongside invited clinical responses.

As a clinician, my original psychotherapy training was in group analysis with a strong emphasis on intercultural perspectives. I have vivid memories of conducting a particular therapy group in central London, which was composed of patients drawn from widely diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Only one or two members of this long-term therapy group had English as their mother tongue. From time to time the narratives, images and metaphors of popular films and contemporary culture would take hold of the group as we struggled to find a common language. When ordinary conversation floundered, our collective and individual experiences of the arts seemed to facilitate communication with one another. As we allowed cohesion to develop through mutual immersion in the discussion of a film, we used this as a means to develop an increasingly coherent discourse as a group. Where language is both limited and limiting, art works.

In January this year, David Bowie died. Amongst a number of my patients who spontaneously went into mourning for him, one used his passing to memorably re-engage with her transgendered youth, for which Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona (Bowie, 1972) had been a significant icon. Through active imagination, a renewed syzygy emerged for this patient, as animus and anima tearfully and energetically re-engaged with one another, markedly reducing her felt sense of both self-alienation and alienation from the Other