Reports and Brief Communications: A psychoanalyst's reflections on Almodovar's film “Talk to Her”

When Lydia, a female matador, lapses into a coma after being struck by the horns of a raing bull, her lover, Marco, meets a male nurse at the clinic where she is being treated. We, in the audience, gradually become aware of the importance Benigno attaches to talking to his patient, the lovely Alicia, also in coma after a car accident. The relationship between Benigno and Alicia is an unusual one. It goes well beyond those we normally encounter in our daily contacts with patients. Benigno's relationship to the unconscious Alicia offers unusual clarification of the significance of speech.

For those of us who practise psychoanalysis, Almodovar's film “Talk to Her” raises issues that concern the importance of fantasies — both for the analysts and their patients. These affect our entire psyches when we allow ourselves to be drawn into the analytical process in earnest and undertake, embrace, our patient's unspoken fantasies and experiences. This process often gives rise to intensive suffering and profound doubt about the possibility of development. Despair comes easy and it is difficult to maintain hope, the naïve reliance that seems to animate Benigno. He talks to the unconscious Alicia and her life is restored by his care. That at least is what the audience sees when it views the world through Benigno's eyes. We follow his thoughts and feelings, his internal flow of words and images. We also experience his difficulty in reflecting on this flow.

The difficulty of integrating both flow and reflection with each other is one we recognise from our daily pyschoanalytical practice. This has also taught us that the reconciliation of the two depends on the ability to switch from play to seriousness, between “psychic equivalence” and “pretendmode”, to use the words of Fonagy & Target (2000) in their article “Playing with reality.”

In addition to stimulating thought about the nature of consciousness, Almodovar's film also enables us to contemplate masculinity and femininity, the cha