Product Description: Therapy and Emotions in Film and Television explores, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the shifts in our emotional preferences, styles, and 'emotional regimes' in western societies from the 1920s to today, as viewed through the lens of film and television.

In "Enjoy Your Symptom!" Slavoj Zizek argues for the accessibility and ultimate simplicity of Lacanian theory by linking it with popular Hollywood film. "Enjoy Your Symptom!" is divided into five chapters, each elucidating some fundamental Lacanian notion or theoretical complex - "letter, fantasy, woman, repetition, phallus, father" - through a reference to Hollywood and the popular culture which forms the background of our common experience. Each chapter is then divided into two parts. In the first part, Lacan is "in Hollywood," ie the notion or complex in question is explained by way of examples from Hollywood or popular culture in general. In the second division, we are "out of Hollywood", ie the same notion is elaborated as it is in its inherent context. The "Why ..." in the title of each chapter purposely evokes the naivete of a child's question. Pick up this book and learn why a "letter" always arrives at its destination with the help of "City Lights", "Now Voyager" and "Letter from an Unknown Woman"; learn why fantasy is the ultimate support of reality with the help of "Rancho", "Notorious", "She" and "Tarzan"; learn why woman is a symptom of man with the help of Roberto Ross.

Product Description: This book explores connections between the diverse ideas of Melanie Klein, Jean-Paul Sartre and Ingmar Bergman. These ideas are explored in relation to their shared focus on imagination and through detailed readings of a number of Bergman's key films.

Product Description: Through a theoretical and practical exploration of Jungian and post-Jungian concepts surrounding image, this book moves beyond the visual scope of imagery to consider the presence and expression of music and sound, as well as how the psyche encounters expanded images – archetypal, personal or cultural – on both conscious and unconscious levels...read more

Product Description: Losing Your Head: Abjection, Aesthetic Conflict, and Psychoanalytic Criticism looks at the subject of beheading in art as a trope of the destruction of the mind. This book discusses both psychoanalytic theory and art criticism. It addresses critics, readers, and spectators interested in the keys of interpretation that psychoanalysis can offer, and analysts who are curious to know if artists can help them refine the tools they use every day...read more

Product Description: This study aims to apply Lacanian ideas to literary texts and film. Why is such an endeavour necessary? One might give different responses to this question: due to Lacan s emphasis on the Symbolic in the constitution of the subject, as he takes the human as a linguistic being, his ideas concerning unconscious might be used in analysing the unconscious of the text or the characters themselves, his ideas on the constitution of the subject might be applicable to the character creation in the texts, etc...read more

The experience of watching films – entertaining, moving, instructive, frightening or exciting as they may be – can be enriched by the opportunity to reflect upon them from unconventional perspectives.Psychoanalytic Reflections on Film: Moving Images offers its readers in an accessible language one such viewpoint, informed by Andrea Sabbadini's psychoanalytic insights and therapeutic experience. Using a psychoanalytic interpretative approach, some twenty-five important feature films are discussed as the artistic vehicles of new, unsuspected meanings. The first chapter looks at films which represent psychoanalytic work itself, having therapists and their patients as their main characters. The remaining five chapters cover movies on themes of central concern to analytic theorists and clinicians, such as childhood and adolescent development, and varieties of intimate relationships among adults. The latter include romantic love and its disturbing association to death fantasies; eroticism and prostitution; and voyeuristic desire – a significant phenomenon in this context given its parallels with the activity of watching films. Andrea Sabbadini's psychoanalytic approach, which explores the part played by unconscious factors in shaping the personality and behaviour of film characters, is used to interpret their internal world and the emotional conflicts engendered by the vicissitudes they live through. The book is completed by a filmography and biographical notes on film directors. Psychoanalytic Reflections on Film presents the relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis as a complex one. These two most different of cultural phenomena are shown to share a wish on the part of their practitioners to uncover profound truths about the human condition, and to provide a language with which to describe them. Going beyond futile ‘psycho-historical’ attempts to analyse filmmakers through their products, or a superficial application of psychoanalytic concepts to film, Sabbadini shows how both cinema and psychoanalysis can benefit from a meaningful interdisciplinary dialogue between them. The book will be of special interest to practicing psychoanalysts and students, scholars and historians of film studies.

Films can hold personal psychological meanings that are often at odds with their narratives. Examining the intersections between mental health and the cinema, Somatic Cinema represents the cutting edge of film theory, evaluating the significance of this phenomenon both in therapy and in the everyday world. Luke Hockley draws on the insights of phenomenological and Jungian film theory and applies them alongside more established psychoanalytic approaches. The result is to combine the idea of affective bodily experience with unconscious processes as a means to explore a new ontology of the cinema. The emphasis is therefore shifted from pure intellectual insight to greater inclusion of personally constructed meanings and experiences. Several key concepts are developed and explored throughout the book. These include: The idea of the ‘Third Image’, occupying the intersubjective space between viewer and screen, and therapist and client The concept of the Cinematic Frame (as opposed to the Film Frame), the container of the psychological relationship between viewer and screen The use of the Cinematic Experience to encapsulate the somatic expression of unconscious effects that develop while a film is viewed and which are central to the creation of personal psychological meanings. With a focus on examining why we develop a personal relationship with films, Somatic Cinema is ideal for academics and students of film studies, media studies and analytical psychology.

Product Description: The essays within this collection explore the possibilities and potentialities of all three positions, presenting encounters that are, at times contradictory, at other times supportive, as well as complementary. The collection thereby enriches the questions that are being raised within contemporary cinematic studies...read more

Product Description: Teresa De Lauretis makes a bold and orginal argument for the renewed relevance of the Freudian theory of drives, through close readings of texts ranging from cinema and literature to psychoanalysis and cultural theory.

Product Description: Hitchcock gets onto the analyst’s couch in this extraordinary volume of case studies. The contributors bring to bear an unrivaled enthusiasm and theoretical sweep on the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, analyzing movies such as Rear Window and Psycho...read more

Product Description: As the father of cinematic Surrealism, extensive critical attention has been devoted to Luis Buñuel’s cinema. Much has been written about his first Surrealist films of the 1920s and 1930s and the French art movies of the 1960s and 1970s...read more

Slavoj Zizek, dubbed by the Village Voice "the giant of Ljubljana," is back with a new edition of his seriously entertaining book on film, psychoanalysis (and life). His inimitable blend of philosophical and social theory, Lacanian analysis, and outrageous humor are made to show how Hollywood movies can explain psychoanalysis-and vice versa using films such as Marnie and The Man Who Knew Too Much.

'Traumatic Encounters' addresses the question of the relationship between psychoanalysis and film in a thoroughly original way, bringing together Lacanian theory and Italian cinema as a means to unravel the deepest kernel of repressed knowledge around which film narratives are constructed. The primary theoretical reference of the book is the Real, the most under-represented of the three Lacanian categories (Symbolic, Imaginary and Real), which designates the traumatic dimension of reality that cannot be integrated in the order of language and communication. Exploring the relationship between film and its unconscious underside, the author argues that only by locating the elusive “traces of the cinematic Real” can a given film narrative be reconstructed in its entirety. Like the Lacanian subject, film here appears as fundamentally split between a traumatic dimension beyond signification (the Real), and awareness of its fragile symbolic status.Always stylistically innovative, thematically defiant and driven by a strong political agenda, Italian cinema lends itself particularly well to a critical investigation aimed at radicalising the impact of psychoanalysis on film. In doing exactly that, the book deliberately avoids the standard cultural and historical approaches to film. Instead, it moves freely amongst some of the most widely celebrated – as well as lesser-known – Italian films of the post-war period, discussing the ways in which they tackle such themes as desire, fantasy, sexuality, violence and the law, to mention but a few. The main focus is on the work of those directors who most effectively engage with the divisive nature of the moving image: Antonioni, Pasolini and Rossellini. In addition, the book provides ample and insightful references to films by Visconti, Bertolucci, Bellocchio, Moretti, Petri, Fellini, Ferreri, and many more.

Product Description: Covering 5000 international films, from the Indian film Aaghata to the US production Zodura, Flowers (psychology, Chapman U.) and Frizler (literature and film studies, Chapman U.) list films that have featured a psychotherapist as a character, providing basic production information and brief descr...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Consisting of contributions from psychoanalysts and therapists, as well as authors in such fields as literature and cinema studies, Celluloid Couches, Cinematic Clients explores how therapy and therapists have been portrayed in the movies over the last seventy-five years. From the 1926 silent film Secrets of a Soul, to Hitchcock's 1946 classic Spellbound, to the recent Girl, Interrupted, the contributors look at how moviemakers view therapy and the "talking cure" and examine important themes and controversies in the process. Very often, cinematic efforts to portray the treatment process in psychoanalysis or psychotherapy are idiosyncratic, misleading, distorted, or even pathological. Yet this collection is not nearly as interested in denouncing such portrayals as in examining those films that offer us the opportunity to explore themes and issues from a vantage point outside our usual reference frame. Rather than focusing on what screenwriters and directors got wrong, each contributor asks instead what might be learned from the movies about professional selves and the nature of the therapeutic endeavor.

Product Description: How long have psychotherapists been depicted in films? Nearly as long as there have been films—or psychotherapists, for that matter. This isn’t surprising if one considers that the Freudian revolution in psychology and the invention of motion pictures occurred at about the same time...read more