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Hannah Arendt, in her lectures at The New School, used to maintain that every thinker has essentially only one central idea. In this context she was fond of quoting an anecdote about Gertrude Stein, who was said to have undertaken to write a novel in which she would include one example of every possible type of human being; but she gave the project up when she realized she could do it.
If we agree with Arendt, then reviewing a collection of an author's essays such as Harvey Greenberg's Screen Memories, essays that were written over a period of decades during which the author was growing and developing his thoughts and approach, would pose for the reviewer a similar task: how to discover the central idea that links various themes.
Greenberg makes the reviewer's task somewhat easier by including in his introduction a history of his own involvement with film studies. And he himself articulates, if not the central idea of the work, at least the central approach: As one of only a handful of— and one of the first—practicing analysts who have produced a significant body of sophisticated work on film, Greenberg brings to the study of film first and foremost his training and clinical experience as a practitioner. As a result, all of the essays in the volume share an attention to concrete clinical detail and to the complexities of the human psyche that is absent from much of psychoanalytically informed film studies. Taken to its (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) extreme, this approach involves psychoanalyzing Norma Bates, Norman Bates's mother in Psycho, a character who, it will be recalled, appears in the film only as a taxidermed corpse. And yet even this clinical flourish may not appear to be so very extravagant when we consider that is corresponds to what we do as clinicians all the time—namely, attempt to reconstruct at least our