Film Notes

With this issue we inaugurate a new section of the Psychoanalytic Review, the Film Notes section. The Film Notes will be brief contributions on current films that engage the films from a psychoanalytically informed perspective. The Review has a long history of commitment to psychoanalytic writing on film, a commitment that is based, in part, on the belief that film, as a mass-audience art form that is the product of a team effort rather than the work of a single individual, is uniquely positioned with respect to its contemporary cultural context, so that, to whatever extent it makes sense to speak of a collective societal fantasy life, including a societal unconscious, films can offer a royal road to its interpretation. With the introduction of the Film Notes as an ongoing part of the Review, we hope to add a new dimension to that interpretation by making possible a continuous tracking of the contemporary vicissitudes of societal fantasy life — including collective fantasies of politics, gender, race, sexual orientation — in a way that single articles on individual films cannot do. Moreover, since the individual psyche is to a greater or lesser degree constructed through the matrix of societal fantasy, this interpretation of cultural fantasies will inevitably reflect back on and interface with our clinical psychoanalytic experience. For these reasons we have assembled a group of contributors from both clinical psychoanalytic and film theory backgrounds, in the belief that each field has much to offer the other. We welcome inquiries from anyone interested in becoming a contributor, and we hope readers and contributors alike will find the new section diought provoking and enjoyable.