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As anyone familiar with the academic film scene knows, psychoanalysis has in the past decade or so exerted a considerable influence on film theory and criticism. I do not refer to the commonplace practice of interpreting the behavior of characters in a film narrative or the underlying meanings of a plot or theme. The more recent application of psychoanalysis has shifted the focus from narrative and structure to the nature of the relationship between the material on the screen and the psychological and interpretative processes of the spectator. At its best, such criticism has sharpened our awareness of the conventions and assumptions underlying narrative structures and the use of film techniques that reinforce the spectator's identification with these conventions. At its worst, such criticism recklessly adopts a psychoanalytic principle, such as Lacan's mirror stage, and maps these on to the film experience indiscriminately. Robert Eberwein's book Film and the Dream Screen is, alas, an example of the latter.
Applying certain concepts of Bertram Lewin's, Eberwein proposes that the “viewing of film on the cinematic screen … revives the sensation of the dream screen” experienced when we peacefully nodded off to sleep after nursing at the mother's breast. The motion picture screen is, for Eberwein, the “ultimate prosthesis in the history of human invention,” serving “as a surrogate, deriving from infancy, for the physiological and psychic union we enjoyed with the mother: the screen is both breast and infant, the mother and self.”
These assertions, however, are not arrived at through any logical line of thought; nor are they treated metaphorically in the spirit, for example, of Susanne Langer's remark that “Cinema is ‘like’ dream in the mode of its presentation,” its creation of a “virtual present, an order of direct apparition.” On the contrary, Eberwein's idea of a hypothesis is simply to repeat something over and over in the hope that it will eventually seem like an obv