Abstract
Psychoanalysis and Film
Psychoanalysis and film share a passion for the close examination of lived experience, human motivations, and hidden elements of the mind. We are pleased to offer a selection of reviews that explore cinema through the lens of psychoanalytic thought. In his review of William Fried’s Critical Flicker Fusion: Psychoanalysis at the Movies, Richard Waugaman addresses a number of questions raised in the book: Are films best treated by psychoanalysis as a special kind of dream material to be interpreted, or is it useful to also ponder the relationships among film, filmmaker, writer, and producer? What is it about films that makes them “particularly unique among the arts”? Waugaman agrees with Fried that we are drawn to the drama, the secrets, the literary, musical, and theatrical elements of film, and points out that we all take pleasure in the suspension of disbelief that films invite. Waugaman appreciates how Fried’s astute interpretations of films produce surprise and delight, and deepen our understanding of each film discussed in the book. He agrees with Fried’s view that films can be approached as dream material, adding that “our various self states are active in our dreams, and they are also activated by watching films, as we identify with their various characters.”
In Cinematic Reflections on the Legacy of The Holocaust: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Nancy Goodman writes, the editors of the volume, Diana Diamond and Bruce Sklarew, “have gathered together psychoanalysts who know film and are fearless in their ability to witness trauma.” Further, Goodman reflects that “each chapter provides psychoanalytic understanding of the severe psychic wounds left in our minds after confronting the Holocaust.” In her review, Goodman considers the overwhelming terrors of the Holocaust, which can leave the mind frozen, unable to process unthinkable trauma. Films of the Holocaust offer the viewer a manageable distance from which to reflect, and, as Goodman points out, the commentators in this volume provide a secondary protective layer, through interpretation, reflection, and integration. In her review, Goodman pays tribute to Dori Laub, who—up to his death in 2018—taught that bearing witness to trauma allows for the return of “the capacity for an associative mind.”
In a review of Andreas Hamburger’s new book, Filmpsychoanalysis: The Unconscious in Cinema—The Cinema in the Unconscious, Timo Storck covers the author’s exploration of similarities between the positions of the viewer of films and the psychoanalyst in practice. Hamburger presents filmpsychoananalysis as a method of exploring myths underlying film narratives, reflecting on the director’s subjectivity, addressing developmental crises in characters, and understanding films as a form of dreamwork. In addition to applying this critical method to the content and form of films, Hamburger shares with the reader his subjective reception of the films he discusses. Storck makes clear that Hamburger’s filmpsychoanalysis draws on relational theory to form parallels between the analytic situation and the emotional experience of watching a movie.
Psychoanalysis across Borders
In this section, we address the value of psychoanalytic thought and practice for a critical exploration of the current global sociopolitical climate. In his thoughtful review of Barbara Eisold’s Psychodynamic Perspectives on Asylum Seekers and the Asylum-Seeking Process: Encountering Well-Founded Fear, Steven Botticelli shines a light on the depth, complexity, and urgency of Eisold’s work outside the confines of the consulting room. Eisold’s book describes her work providing evalu-ations—and at times ongoing treatment—to asylum seekers in the U.S., many of whom have experienced profound trauma, torture, or other abuse in their countries of origin. This critically important political work has brought Eisold into contact with individuals who have demonstrated extraordinary resilience and determination, and who come from cultures very different from her own. Botticelli sensitively addresses the countertransferential dilemmas that may confront the analyst in the evaluation and treatment of traumatized individuals like those Eisold describes. Eisold’s work has led her to form the Immigration and Human Rights Work Group—under the auspices of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis—where she has trained others to provide services and continues to bring her work to the asylum-seeking community. We may all be grateful, as Botticelli suggests, that “after many years of quiet work Eisold has chosen to bring this important work—and herself!—to our attention.”
Luis Herrera Abad’s Psychoanalytic Reflections on Violence in Peru—reviewed here by Carole Levaque—studies the impact of decades of violence and terror conducted in Peru in the 1980s by Sendero Luminoso. In his book, Herrera Abad approaches violence from an interdisciplinary perspective combining psychoanalysis, philosophy, and sociology. Following Foucault’s ideas, Herrera Abad first studies the dynamics of power and its necessary involvement in the foundation of societies. Herrera Abad then reflects on how the traumatic impact of Sendero Luminoso imbues the imaginary worlds and fantasies of literature, and of patients’ narratives. As these militants spread their dystopian ideology, Peruvian society became enmeshed with a history of victims and victimizers, which started—Herrera Abad argues—at the time of the Spanish Conquest of Peru. The author wonders whether and how psychoanalysis today can address the impact of national historical trauma in the individual psyche.
In a review of Laurence Kahn’s What Nazism Has Done to Psychoanalysis, Rachel Boué Widawsky highlights in detail Kahn’s argument on the destructive impact the Nazi regime wrought on postwar and postmodern psychoanalytic theories. Kahn portrays the manner in which Nazi death culture perverted and corrupted psychoanalytic concepts: examples are the use of the drive concept to justify the self-preservation of the Aryan race and the transformation of the Führer, the religious leader of Moses and Monotheism, into a legitimated murderer. After a thorough study of the historical context of Freud’s writings, Kahn tracks the gradual suppression of aggressive drives in postwar psychoanalytic theories, from ego psychology to self psychology to relational theory and theories of trauma. She argues that the suppression of aggressive drive not only distances contemporary analytic theory from Freud, but also—more importantly—denies the existence of destructive human tendencies.
Freud in Social and Historical Context
In his review of Freud: The Unconscious and World Affairs, Arnold Richards appreciates how authors René Major and Chantal Talagrand situate a study of Freud’s life and work in the context of his time and place. Unlike most biographies, Richards notes, this one is not organized chronologically. Rather, it opens with an event that took place in 1933: a book burning in Nazi Germany, at which (in keeping with Kahn’s focus on how Nazism affected psychoanalysis) Freud’s books “were consigned to the flames,” along with those of Marx. In their first chapter, Major and Talagrand invite us to consider the question “Why burn Freud’s books?” Their biography is a thoughtful meditation on both “the personal determinants of Freud’s work,” and his contemporaries’ varied reactions to his contributions.
The Body and the Feminine in Psychoanalysis
In an era of rapid change in social conceptions of gender and the body, it is useful to step back and reflect on what has changed and what has remained constant over time. In her review of Janice Lieberman’s Clinical Evolutions on the Superego, Body, and Gender in Psychoanalysis, Susan Bers cites Lieberman’s observation that narcissism, greed, envy, and exploitation of others are not new concerns, though they may have surged to the foreground in recent years. Bers highlights Lieberman’s reflections on aspects of morality and the notion of the “analyst’s superego”: “What happens,” she writes, “when the analyst’s personal values differ from the patient’s? What is the place of the analyst’s own values in treatment?” Bers also spotlights Lieberman’s invitation to consider the role of vision as “listening’s twin,” providing an additional pathway for contact with a patient. Bers comments that Lieberman’s notion of the analyst “as spectator” allows her to speak concretely with patients whose chronic emptiness, early experiences of “masked deprivation,” or other narcissistic problems may interfere with their symbolic capacity. For such patients, Bers tells us, Lieberman invites the reader to reach beyond traditional analytic interpretations toward more concrete or physical observations—something Lieberman likens to an Orthodox Jew eating bacon. Lieberman contends that such interventions allow her to work with patients other analysts might turn away, “developing their capacity for self-reflection and symbolic thinking by meeting them at their level of functioning, all the while thinking about them psychoanalytically.” Ultimately, Bers tells us that “what stands out is that the papers collected in this volume show Lieberman’s work providing valuable updating and reinvigoration to psychoanalysis.”
Hattie Myers’s review of Changing Notions of the Feminine: Confronting Psychoanalysts’ Prejudices, edited by Margarita Cereijido, offers the warning that “writing can be a dangerous act of exposure but perhaps never more so than when the subject pertains to what women want and who women are.” This edited volume addresses the complexity of women’s internal and societal experiences and how modern-day psychoanalytic theory and technique must awaken to new clinical explorations. Myers highlights the editor’s belief that prejudice is inevitable; thus, Myers tells us, Cereijido’s intention with this volume is “to make clinicians aware that they have prejudices about the feminine that will influence how they listen and give meaning to their patients’ material, and that these prejudices need to be explored and monitored.” Each essay, according to Myers, grapples in its own way with unconscious sexism, changing notions of the feminine, and the reevaluation of early psychoanalytic, phallocentric theoretical constructs. “The essays in this book,” Myers tells us, “attempt to redress both the lag and the lacunae in psychoanalytic theorizing and practice”; Cerejido’s volume “is not for the faint of heart.”
Why I Write: Salman Akhtar
In “Dancing with Words,” Salman Akhtar invites the reader to revel with him in the particular pleasures that only writing can bring—the joy of discovering a certain phrase, conjuring a particular image; the affiliative connections established across the arc of generations; the pleasure of being known, read, and—one hopes—understood. For Akhtar, writing offers a rare experience of receptivity and of wholeness within himself. In beautiful prose, he shares with us the inner workings of his rich and prolific writing life—one that will set us all on our dancing feet.