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A century ago, Sigmund Freud turned down $100,000—then an astronomical amount—to consult on a movie epic about history's greatest love stories. Why did Freud, who was inventing psychoanalysis the same year that cinema emerged in 1895, apparently underestimate the new medium's potential? How apt is the age-old comparison between film and dream? When we surrender to a film, do we regress into an infant dozing at the breast? Become voyeurs of the male gaze? How similar is a film to a psychoanalytic session? How do we interpret a film psychoanalytically? (Not by approaching its characters as if they were patients, but by first letting the film affect us naturally, then recording our emotional responses, and finally sharing them with others.) How worthwhile is examining the director's motives and neuroses? (Not very—at least psychoanalytically.)
In this enlightening book, psychoanalyst Andreas Hamburger answers these questions and more as he offers a contemporary method for psychoanalytical film interpretation grounded in a relational understanding of psychoanalysis that centers the viewer's experience. Indeed, he declares that “it is the body of the viewer in which film takes effect” (p. 17). Interweaving insights from such disciplines as philosophy and pop culture, Hamburger deftly compares and coalesces various perspectives on film psychoanalysis and cinema theory, wielding a vast arsenal of illuminating examples. Perhaps above all else, he maintains, “as film psychoanalysts, we must approach the work as a work of art,” rather than “as a convenient illustration of our theories” (p. 167).
Hamburger adroitly scrutinizes and supplements psychiatrist Glen Gabbard's standard classification of film psychoanalytical approaches, including character analysis and how films manufacture modern mythologies and reflect universal crossroads in development. For instance, science fiction horror films depict “the imaginative world of early childhood,” thereby providing “the audience mast