When I was teaching second-year medical students the basics of psychodynamic psychiatry, I tried to illustrate dynamic concepts by referring to fairy tales and children's stories that aptly demonstrate defense mechanisms, modes of infantile thought, family relationships, and the like. Unfortunately, my allusions reached only a small portion of the class. I had assumed that a working knowledge of fairy tales was part of every medical student's heritage. In my childhood the radio program Let's Pretend was our Sesame Street. Fairy tales were read to us and by us.
Since the current generation was nurtured on TV and movies, I decided to go to film for my illustrations of dynamic principles—and, for the English majors in the class, to theater as well. When the Repertory Theater of St. Louis came into being, some of its supporters, knowing of my interest in theater, asked me to discuss some of the more esoteric plays being produced. Eventually this culminated in the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institutes collaboration with the St. Louis Art Museum on a film series entitled The Celluloid Couch. The series, which has become a regularly scheduled event, is advertised in the publications of both organizations and since 1987 has drawn an annual audience of approximately fifteen hundred.
For the first five years of the program, five analysts would each select a film. The evening it was shown, the host analyst would spend fifteen minutes or so introducing the film, alerting the audience to its salient features or to questions or paradoxes that it raises. In some instances, the background of the film—the history of the director, the literary or personal life of an author whose work was adapted to the screen—would alert the audience and inform their viewing of the film. Afterward, the analyst would present a more detailed discussion and answer questions. The Celluloid Couch has been very successful from a public relations and educational standpoint, and has helped a relatively small institute attain a measure of visibility in an otherwise hostile professional community. In 1993 the program was expanded, five films being offered in the spring and another four in the fall, enabling us to reach an audience of 2,700.
Although a variety of theoretical and empirical concepts have been developed that are relevant to this form of applied psychoanalysis, so far the participating analysts have not availed themselves of the literature. Instead we have approached our project without regard for precedent and with little collaboration with one another. As a result, each presentation has been undeniably analytic but uniquely different. This relaxed pioneering spirit, whatever its drawbacks, has allowed us the freedom to discuss a film from whatever vantage point seems most suitable. Our overriding goal has been to demonstrate how a knowledge of psychoanalysis can enhance our understanding and appreciation of the artistic decisions of the film's
creators and the emotional impact of the film experience. Our audiences, we have found, are familar with film as an academic study—some more so than we—and have more than the average educated layman's knowledge of analysis. We have learned never to underestimate their capacity to understand.
Concerning the choice of films, we have found that the presenter must have some personal and emotional connection to the film. If it has no special meaning for the analyst, the discussion will not engage the audience. Once, when my first two choices were unavailable and I had quickly to choose a third, my immersion in the film, and hence my discussion, suffered greatly. That a film is popular, or sexy, or a classic is insufficient.
Once I have chosen a film, I begin preparing my discussion by repeated viewings, often with weeks intervening. One time I'm attentive to the story line, another to the sound track, still other times to the work of the actors, the cinematographer, the director. If the screen play is an adaptation of a book, I read the original and take note of the the differences—omissions, changes in emphasis, descriptions of people or places, etc. If the same author has written other works, I will attempt to read them as well. Reading critical reviews of the film, though informative, is not often very helpful. Since usually the director exerts the greatest artistic control over a film and has made the major decisions in determining its shape and final form, it is useful and certainly tempting to examine his life history and past productions for some specific significance the present work might have for him. However, one of our discussants cautions that the scarcity of information about most directors adds a certain riskiness to this endeavor. There are also ethical and legal issues to be considered as one assesses what belongs in the public realm and what constitutes an unwarranted intrusion into a person's inner life.
Depending on the specific film, different procedures may be emphasized more than others, but the total effect is one of immersion in the task, much like one's immersion in the analysis of one's patient. One of my colleagues watched a film eight to ten times, often while doing other things around the house. During his morning walk, preconscious impressions would begin to take form. Gradually, and sometimes suddenly, certain aspects of the film would assume special significance, latent symmetries would be revealed, questions not thought of earlier would come to the fore. This discussant viewed it as an emerging and evolving process, so that the actual writing of the presentation was done at the last minute, “like a pregnancy with a due date for delivery.” Another discussant tries a more methodical approach to the film and then orders the findings from an extensive research process. In considering Raging Bull, his initial ideas about the film changed markedly with continued viewing and the results of research. I mention this to highlight the fact that often we have only the vaguest of ideas about the “meaning” of a film at the beginning of our preparation. What we finally say has to await the time when all our synthetic abilities are harnessed to the task. Finally, when pen must be put to paper, our ideas attain definition and clarity. Another of our discussants prefers to write out his text in full midway through the process and then revise accordingly as research and viewing proceeds.
All of us have found that the creative process continues long after the actual presentation. Ideas generated during the writing, or during the discussion, act as a catalyst for other ideas and presentations. Thus, what starts out as two to three months' lead time for preparation may stretch out into more extended investigations at some future time. My discussion of Deliverance has led to the gathering of information about “replacement children” for a paper as yet unwritten.
In preparing for a discussion of Silence of the Lambs, I was confronted with several tasks. First, I had to explain the popularity and fascination of a film dealing with gross primitive perversions; this
required comment on the mind games being played by the characters with one another and by the creator with the audience. The portrayal of a psychiatrist in such an horrific yet ambivalent manner also begged commentary. My first step was to gather whatever reviews, comments, etc. a literature search might uncover, and to glean from them information about the writer of the novel, the screenwriter, the director, the various stars, etc.
With Silence this search wasn't very useful. My eventual remarks emerged more from multiple viewings of the film, which led to several points of entry, including above all the idea of a puberty rite for Jodie Foster's Agent Sterling—her FBI training, her contact with male mentors, her reworking of traumatic losses. However, it was a puberty rite that was not to turn her into “a gent,” certainly not via the sex change the serial killer had hoped to achieve for himself. Rather, it would allow her to take her place in a man's world as a woman, while simultaneously retaining a partial identification with her deceased police officer father. The theme of loss was pervasive, not just with Sterling, but in the threatened loss of the female senator's daughter. One had to turn to the novel, however, to learn of the early loss of the serial killer's mother, and of the terminal cancer of the FBI director's wife. Assuming a thematic unity emanating from the author, I used Hannibal Lecter's own remarks and behavior to hypothesize that he too had suffered a significant and traumatic loss, which he was attempting to resolve through cannibalistic behavior.
The next year I chose a film that was virtually unknown, The Field. In order to understand this film, expertise in intrafamilial dynamics is insufficient. I felt I had to understand the history and culture of the peoples portrayed and to follow the intergenerational transmission of pathology and trauma.
Ostensibly, the film starts out as a portrayal of the hardships of rural Irish life. As the story unfolds, increasingly horrible things happen, finally reaching a sustained crescendo of multiple deaths and madness. Manifestly, this is an intrafamilial tragedy of a patriarchs attempt to buy the field he and his father worked as tenant fanners, and to pass it on to his only surviving son. But the present is to be understood only through knowledge of the family's past, a past that extends into an even earlier generation and in so doing takes us into the troubled and tragic history of an occupied and oppressed Ireland. Here my research took me to the history of the Celts and their manner of land use; the conquest of Ireland by the British; the potato famine of 1845; the massive emigration of the populace; the role of the church; and, of course, Irish politics in the face of British oppression and exploitation. This background was essential to understanding the intense meaning the field held for Bull McCabe, a meaning that contributed to his eventual madness and suicide. What to some might seem an historical digression was for me as natural as taking a thorough developmental history from the parents of a child patient. As analysts, we are often able to see the transmission of trauma through several generations (I think here of Kestenberg's work on Holocaust survivors, their children and grandchildren).
What also required analytic explanation is how a father who ostensibly wanted his son to become a man nevertheless acted in ways designed to keep him a mischievous little tyke. How does it happen that despite love between father and son,
the son is not allowed to take his place as a man among men? The suicide of the first son, the long estrangement and silence between Bull and his wife, and his developing madness also cried out for analytic scrutiny and explication. The violence of the film is barely noticed at the start of the film; by the end it has attained overwhelming and depressing proportions. This is probably the reason The Field did not find much of an audience, since in other cinematic respects it is a work of great artistry. Unlike the horror of Silence, the horror here has no element of the fantastic and no happy FBI commencement exercise. The author of the novel The Field, the Irishman John Keane, is known for the exactness and accuracy of his realism. However, only an analytic approach that recognizes the social and political traumata that affect a family down through the generations is able to view the madness, the suicide, and the violence in this family as an understandable, almost inevitable outcome.
My preparation for discussing Deliverance was very different. Viewing the film several times, reading the reviews, comparing the film with the novel were insufficient. The author, James Dickey, who also acted the role of the sheriff, is a well-established poet who has written extensively about his work and his teaching, but primarily about himself. Novel and film are both about murder and whether it can successfully be concealed and “forgotten,” but the story is complicated by the fact that the murderer cannot be sure that his victim was indeed the man who killed his companion and who would have killed the remainder of his party.
My discussion of the film focused on the vicissitudes and interrelationship of male rape, homosexuality (manifest and latent), and the attainment of a sense of masculinity. More important, I felt that the core issue was guilt and how, in order to alleviate it, murder can be justified. Telling here is the fact that Dickey flew more than a hundred bombing missions over Japan, acts he described as “sanitized killing.” But unlike many who kill, Dickey consciously sought to identify with and get inside the victim, a sort of primitive unity between killer and killed. This theme is to be found in the novel and dominates his poetry.
My next breakthrough did not occur until some time after the presentation. I read that only two months after Dickey's wife of thirty years had died suddenly and unexpectedly, he had married a student less than half his age. Thus was I alerted to the author's problems with loss and mourning. This tied in with his brother's having died of meningitis at age two. Young James was the replacement child for the brother that his mother could not mourn but only replace. While not part of my original discussion, this insight helped me to understand the guilt of a man who continually ponders the concept that his existence depends on the death of another he never knew, but to whom in a sense he owes his life. Had his brother lived, he assumes, he would never have been conceived. This fact pervades his life, dictates the themes of his poetry, and organizes his daily experience.
Thus, through the richness and clarity of Dickey's writings, and through his penchant (almost an obsession) for self-disclosure, a work of popular culture, the movie Deliverance, is shown to have roots in early developmental traumas acting as an organizing force in an artist's life and creativity.
One of the benefits of practicing analysis on a daily basis is the constant confirmation (or refutation) of things we have been taught or have read in our journals. On occasion we have the good fortune to believe that a patient has helped us find something new and worthy of dissemination. In addition, every patient educates us in matters about which we have little or meager knowledge (sometimes imparting to us more than we care to know, as when I once treated a medical malpractice attorney). However, the embryonic scholar in me enjoys my preparations for these film discussions, and the fascinating if random contributions they make to my learning. Time-consuming and difficult, these preparations are nonetheless enjoyable and personally rewarding, even as they eventuate in the publics greater appreciation of the insights afforded by psychoanalysis.