Epilogue

This Collection of Articles by Prominent European and American psychoanalysts and film scholars highlights the ways in which psychoanalytic readings of film enrich and parallel our clinical endeavors. Sabbadini's conversation with Bertolucci and the contribution by Costantini and Golinelli on Sabina Spielrein's relationship with Carl Gustav Jung illustrate how, 100 years after their inception, psychoanalysis and film continue their creative synergy. Articles by Taylor Robinson, Diamond, and others explore how cinematic techniques such as the restriction, narrowing, or distortion of perspective enlargeour understanding of defensive processes mobilized in the face of loss and trauma. Other contributions, such as those by Wrye, Battistini, Marchiori, Goisis, and DeMari, and by Sabbadini, offer a psychoanalytic perspective into the complexities of parent—child, sibling, and couple relationships portrayed in a plethora of European films, providing us with social character types of which our own patients often represent the extremes. Other articles, such as those by Sklarew, Costantini, and Golinelli, and Stein, explore the possibilities and limitations of aesthetic experience as a mode of transcendence and defense in the face of individual or historical trauma. Further, articles such as those by Stein, Diamond, and Portuges, which depict the plight of individuals caught in the vortex of historical cataclysms and transformations, explore the ways in which the individual psyche forms a locus of resistance, as well as reflecting social and historical conditions, and thus enlarge our understanding of human capacities for self definition, endurance, resistance, and recovery.

It has been observed that over the past 100 years, since its inception, cinema has come to construct reality as much as represent it . The articles in this issue illustrate that during the past century, psychoanalysis and film have literally altered the ways in which we construct narratives of our experien