Analyze This

The title of this film, a popular gesture of obscene defiance, represents a challenge to psychoanalysis. If the object offered for analysis by the title is understood as meaning the erect penis, the challenge itself certainly undertakes more than this film is able to deliver. One wonders whether psychoanalysis is up to the challenge, for when the penis is mistaken for the phallus, as the film's title would suggest, it can only be enjoyed in utter ignorance.1 Until enjoyment does not happen, that is; then the challenge begins to sound more like an appeal for help. Analyze This, a recent film directed by Harold Ramis and written by Kenneth Lonergan and Peter Tolan inspires many thoughts on psychoanalysis and its relation to potency, both real and symbolic, in contemporary American culture.

The publicity for Analyze This announces: “New York's most powerful gangster is about to get in touch with his feelings. YOU try telling him his 50 minutes are up.” The implication is that organized crime exercises a tyranny only the mastery of psychoanalysis can resist. Does this testify to a disavowed demand for a tyrannical Master? Analyze This is a variably funny film which, while it questions the authority of both psychoanalysis and organized crime, seems to condense nostalgia for the patriarchal family with fear of the sinister truth of American capitalism. The Mafia has long fascinated cinema audiences. But why should the American public both fear and be fascinated by psychoanalysis? Why should it be so misrepresented in film? Why does the media periodically announce that Freud's theories have been disproved definitively, where the proof itself is fraudulent, nonexistent, or visibly ignorant of the theory it purports to denounce?

In Analyze This Ben Sobel (Billy Crystal) is a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst in the mode of the male hysteric made famous by Woody Allen. Paul Vitti (Robert De Niro) is an overbearing Italian American mobster whose stereotype owes much to the Godfather fi