You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Film is undoubtedly the most popular art form of our times. It emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, at the same time as depth psychology, and together they marked the beginning of ‘modernity’. Film was born of modern consciousness. It develops and changes in correspondence with the changes of the collective psyche. The experience of watching a film can be compared to the experience in a Jungian psychotherapy session: it is a special place where the psyche can come alive, be experienced and be commented upon. The director who produces a film is not unlike the Self that creates (produces) dreams, but is the psychological analysis of a film an act of imposition on what the director was trying to express? Alternatively, does the power of the film itself evoke in the analyst a response which their experience and understanding move them to articulate in psychological terms?
These are the fundamental ideas of the book Jung on Film, a collection of essays by Jungian therapists from both sides of the Atlantic, on 116 films. It is divided into three parts: ‘A Jungian Perspective’, ‘Four Films and a Director’ and ‘Studies in Genres and Gender’.
An excellent Introduction by the editors clearly presents the Jungian perspective on psychic life and on film analysis which includes the themes of psychological transformation and the ‘alchemy of our conscious-unconscious processes’. The glossary at the end of the book explains Jungian terminology.
In Part I, ‘A Jungian Perspective’, the essay by Don Frederickson, ‘Jung/sign/symbol/film’ draws a distinction between the Freudian (semiotic) and the Jungian (symbolic) perspective, and the difference between what Jung saw as symbol, as opposed to sign:
The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning. But once the meaning has been born out of it, once the expression is found that formulates the thing expected, or divined even better than the hitherto accepted symbol, the symbol is dead, i.e. it possesses only an histori