Demons of the mind: The ‘psy’ sciences and film in the long 1960s

Abstract

This introduction provides context for a collection of articles that came out of a research symposium held at the Science Museum's Dana Research Centre in 2018 for the ‘ Demons of Mind: the Interactions of the ‘Psy’ Sciences and Cinema in the Sixties' project. Across a range of events and research outputs, Demons of the Mind sought to map the multifarious interventions and influences of the ‘psy’ sciences (psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis) on film culture in the long 1960s. The articles that follow discuss, in order: critical engagement with theories of child development in 1960s British science fiction; the ‘horrors’ of contemporary psychiatry and neuroscience portrayed in the Hollywood blockbuster The Exorcist (1973); British social realist filmmakers' alliances with proponents of ‘anti-psychiatry’; experimental filmmaker Jane Arden's coalescence of radical psychiatry and radical feminist techniques in her ‘psychodrama’ The Other Side of the Underneath (1973); and the deployment of film technologies by ‘psy’ professionals during the post-war period to capture and interpret mother-infant interaction.

Film, observation and the mind

“…Anna Toropova has also recently examined the use of film in Soviet psychotherapeutic treatment, revealing the complex ways that film was employed as both observational science, but also therapeutic method in the first half of the 20th century ( Toropova, 2022 ). Recent publications in this journal, including Tim Snelson and William Macauley's edited volume on the psy-sciences in the long 1960s and Katie Joice's article on cinematic microanalysis in the study of mothers and their children from the 1940s to the 1960s, have extended the study of film and psychology into the post-war period ( Joice, 2021 ; Snelson and Macauley, 2021 ), as has Bonnie Evans’ latest article in History of Psychiatry on how film influenced universal approaches to international child development studies in the 1950s ( Evans, 2024 ).…”