Psychoanalysts discussing films have been attracting increasingly large audiences in the Baltimore-Washington area. For the past fourteen years, the Baltimore-Washington Institute has sponsored Close-Ups: Psychoanalysts Look at Film, a discussion series held each March in Baltimore. This series, now held at the Walters Art Gallery, is an educational activity of the extension division. In 1995, each program was seen by an average of 350 people. Films discussed included The Piano, Groundhog Day, The Remains of the Day, and Olivier, Olivier.
Close-Ups films and discussants for March are Blue (Nathan Davis), The Joy Luck Club (Barbara Young), The Secret of Roan Inish (Robert Lessey), and Forrest Gump (Leon Levin). In the fall of 1995 the extension division inaugurated a film series at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda. Weekly programs and discussants were Interview with a Vampire (Barbara Novak), The Piano (Bruce Sklarew), Burnt by the Sun (Lucy Greenblum), and Boys 'n the Hood (Mavis Wiley).
Film discussion as a technique of community education in psychoanalysis is probably less than two decades old. Analysts have traditionally turned to myths, novels, poems, plays, paintings, and sculpture for the purpose of illustrating unconscious motivation. Symbols first discovered in dream interpretation proved useful in bringing out the latent content of these artistic creations. The development of ego psychology led to a focus on how the artistic creation functioned in the life of the artist, both as disguised gratification and defensively.
Film and psychoanalysis began almost simultaneously in the final decade of the nineteenth century. While psychoanalysis was revolutionizing Western thought, films were becoming perhaps the central popular art form of the twentieth century. Bruce Sklarew, who has coordinated film programs at meetings of The American, has stressed the resemblance of films to dreams. They are visual, watched in the dark in a state of immobility, and can magically distort time and space while at the same time conveying an illusion of reality through immediate visual and auditory perceptions.
Psychoanalysts were slow to see that films, like dreams, are worthy of analytic scrutiny and can be used as a tool for vividly communicating psychoanalytic concepts to a wide public. It may be that analysts shied away from films because for a long time cinema was considered a species of low art, mere entertainment. A change of attitude may have been heralded in 1980 by Jacob Arlow's brilliant paper, “The Revenge Motive in the Primal Scene,” in which he utilized Antonioni's Blow Up to explore primal scene phenomena. During the same year, Steven Steury, then of the Baltimore-Washington Institute, now in Milwaukee, contemplated the intensity of people's attraction to movies. He thought this fascination deserved some exploration, and organized a series of psychoanalytic discussions of films in Washington directed at the interested lay public. Cosponsored by the American Film Institute at the Kennedy Center, the 1981 screenings included Lenny, Last Tango in Paris, The Rose, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar. The psychoanalyst discussants' presented their commentaries in about thirty minutes after the film, and then the audience joined in with questions and remarks.
Film discussions soon became an established activity of many psychoanalysts in the Baltimore-Washington area, particularly those connected to the Baltimore-Washington Institute. No fewer than thirty-five series have been presented, some centered around directors such as Bergman, Bertolucci, Altman, Truffaut, and Woody Allen, others dealing with themes such as voyeurism, love triangles, obsessions, phallic women, and family conflicts; and others simply films in which particular analysts happened to be interested. Approximately two hundred film discussions have been presented, in such venues as the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Institution, the Cosmos Club, American University, the D.C. Jewish Community Center, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Walters Art Gallery.
As experience with film discussions accumulated, it became apparent that they exerted the strong impact they do because they meet an audience whose emotions and fantasies are powerfully stirred by a shared experience of the film. Often this heightened state facilitates affectively meaningful communication between analyst and audience, but, when too much anxiety is stimulated, it can also evoke defensiveness. Up to a point, films allow viewers to experience their fantasies with diminished guilt and conflict because, when carried by the film characters, these fantasies are lent deniability. Audiences are generally receptive to analytic interpretations of a film when comments are free of jargon and address human conflicts in terms readily understood. Psychoanalytic terms can be useful if they are shown to express something close to audience experience. At times audience members comment after a program that the discussion has been tension-reducing. Notable instances of this have occurred after the screening of such horror films as Misery and The Vanishing. Clarifying the horrors by relating them to fundamental human desires and anxieties seems to result in a sense of mastery and relief.
Among the audiences for Close-Ups are patients in psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. The impact of the film programs on them is often evident in their treatment in the weeks that follow. The patients frequently seem moved as they bring in new memories or reexamine previous material in greater depth.
Over the years, Close-Ups has attracted an audience that enters enthusiastically and imaginatively into the emotional experience of watching and discussing a film. Many participants are mental health professionals, but a substantial portion of the audience consists of psychologically attuned lay people. In the early years, many people would leave immediately after the film, avoiding the discussion, but this no longer happens with any frequency. Often questions like “Aren't you reading too much into this?” or “Did the author really intend all these meanings?” arise during the discussion. While these questions may be quite legitimate in a theoretical sense, they tend to foster a defensive intellectualization and obstruct the freedom and liveliness of the discussion, blocking the development of a deeper psychological awareness.
The largest audiences are generally attracted to recent commercially successful art films that have sparked unusual interest, strong opinions, popular debate, and a degree of puzzlement. Large audiences have attended such films as The Tin Drum, The Crying Game, Last Tango in Paris, Diva, Like Water for Chocolate, and The Piano.
At the same time that Close-Ups, coordinated first by John Cowl and later by Leon Levin, was becoming established in Baltimore, Bruce Sklarew and Gene Gordon in Washington were founding the Forum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film, an international organization that includes psychoanalysts, mental health professionals, film scholars, filmmakers, and a variety of people interested in the application of psychoanalysis to films. It publishes Projections, a magazine of film discussions and commentaries, that is distributed to members.
The forum's birth was memorable. A two-day retrospective of the films of Bernardo Bertolucci was held at the New School for Social Research in New York. Analysts Marianne Goldberger, Gordon, and Sklarew, along with four prominent film scholars, were the discussants. Bertolucci attended and openly acknowledged the use of his personal psychoanalysis in his work. However, because he preferred not to witness his films being put under the psychoanalytic microscope, he did not arrive until the discussions were over. He then
gave a delightfully informal yet in-depth talk about his filmmaking and a number of related topics. He later agreed to be on the board of the forum, and once bestowed on it as a gift the first American showing of The Last Emperor, which was screened at American University.
One activity of the forum has been sponsorship of a discussion group in Washington that meets monthly after viewing a film. Its twenty or so members are analysts, psychiatrists, other mental health professionals, and a variety of other people (an ophthalmologist, a lawyer, an economist, etc.). The discussions are revealing in showing the richness and variety of responses to the same film. Selective perception and forgetting are revealed in a sometimes startling way, and at times no one is sure what actually happened in a particular film.
Films have been used to demonstrate vividly such psychoanalytic concepts as unconscious motivation, conflict, and defense; symbolic meanings; the role of fantasy; screen memories; and developmental phases. An excellent example is provided by a discussion of a work by a noted Baltimore filmmaker.
Barry Levinson's Avalon is told from the point of view of an adult narrator recalling his childhood. In the course of his reminiscences he briefly, as if in passing, depicts the birth of his younger brother. There follows an extended vignette about the arrival from Europe of an uncle who has survived the Holocaust. The uncle becomes a divisive influence on the extended family as they disagree on how much responsibility they ought to take for him. The quarrel contributes to a disintegration of family ties, a loss of the warm unity that once prevailed. Then the narrator recalls having set a fire as a child, with nearly tragic consequences.
Jill Berkowitz, in a 1993 Close-Ups discussion, treated this sequence as if it were a series of free associations heard in analysis. The displacement of emphasis from the affectively more loaded birth of the brother to the arrival of the disruptive uncle (both intruders) was highlighted. The uncle memory served to screen the brother memory, a displacement that reduced the narrator's anxiety over his resentment toward the new baby for having destroyed his only-child family paradise (Avalon). The motivation for the fire-setting is now revealed by careful attention to the associative sequence. The uncle sequence tends to disconnect the birth of the brother from the fire-setting, thereby obscuring the link between the two events.
This discussion was revealing as to how analysts think in their work. Of course, case histories might serve the same purpose, but the need to protect confidentiality generally precludes their use for community education.
Video has been important in enabling discussants to study a film many times over, resulting in an increase in the depth and quality of their observations. Everything in a film is placed there by the director's choice; the mise en scène is not left to chance. Consequently, every element reveals something about the filmmaker's intent. Discussants have all had the experience of surprise at how many telling details escape observation on first viewing. Noticing what was repressed or isolated affords a valuable opportunity for self-analysis.
Film critics, as well as audiences in general, tend to miss important aspects of films, not only because of emotional factors but also because they see them only once. In discussing Last Tango, Gordon pointed out that early in the film there occurs a scene in which the Marlon Brando character confronts his wife's casket after her suicide. His mother-in-law accuses him of being at fault. The remainder of the film deals with his intense sadomasochistic affair with a beautiful young stranger. He gives no indication of mourning; there is not a word about his wife. Gordon interpreted the erotic affair as a defense against loss, guilt, and mourning. Reviewers (and viewers in general) had not seemed to notice the connection between the impact of the wife's suicide and the rest of the film.
A number of psychoanalytic societies around the country, including Florida, Los Angeles, St. Louis, New York, Topeka, and Chicago, have sponsored successful film programs. It is interesting to note, by the way, how frequently analysts from different cities have independently chosen the same films for discussion (sometimes surprisingly, as happened with Groundhog Day). In New York, Bertram Rosen has led a discussion group for analysts, while in Detroit the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, an affiliate of the Michigan Society, has featured film discussions in its outreach programs. The St. Louis program, the Celluloid Couch (see TAP 28/2), is presented under the auspices of the Museum of Art and attracts audiences of up to five hundred. The museum bears the expenses and charges a two-dollar admission fee. In Baltimore, Close-Ups currently charges ten dollars a ticket and twenty-five for a series of four discussions, which more than covers expenses.
A spin-off of the Baltimore film discussions has been the formation by resident psychiatrists at the University of Maryland and at Johns Hopkins of their own discussion groups. Residents have been frequent attenders at Close-Ups.
One observer has commented that psychoanalysts are having a love affair with films. Berkowitz has stated that some films are like “psychoanalytic playgrounds.” This attraction suggests that film discussions will continue to be a popular meeting place for psychoanalysts and the community.