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Daniel Dervin has always struck me as an extremely talented, original, and incisive thinker. His work on the psychoanalysis of sports (1985) added refreshingly new perspectives. His insightful writings on primal scene imagery and its manifestations in cinema, from a consideration of the comedy and science fiction genres (1980) to an in-depth analysis of Potemkin (1975) and the works of Ingmar Bergman (1983), have been illuminating. Dervin's obvious familiarity with and sympathy for more traditional Freudian perspectives in film analysis have put him in a relative minority amid the current cadre of Lacanian and feminist analyses popular in film academia.
It was thus with pleasure that I sat down to peruse Dervin's latest contribution, Through a Freudian Lens Deeply. This work is an extension and elaboration of his earlier theses, specifically of the ubiquitousness of primal scene imagery rippling just beneath, overtly realized in, or hidden deep within the textual body of various films. Dervin attempts to develop an all-encompassing “psychotechnology” of the cinema based on this perspective.
The book is divided into eight sections. In the first, Dervin introduces his reader to his project and relates a fascinating anecdote where, needing to “suspend” his intellectual labors over this issue, he took a trip with his son to Chaco Canyon. There, amid a plethora of rock art left by the Anasazi Indians, Dervin rediscovered the very premise from which he had labored so much to escape. Dervin photographed (and provides for the reader) a petroglyph depicting nothing less than a couple engaged in the act of intercourse, sitting face to face, and a smaller “third party” drawn a little off to one side. This third party — obviously a child — is portrayed with its arms thrown upward, a gesture suggesting a mixture of terror, surprise, and excitement. Further, the female of the couple faces the child, her arm reaching out in a protective or warning gesture. Dervin continues, “And in