Psychoanalysis and Film

Abstract

Those who believe that the psychoanalytic understanding of human nature is broadly correct will also likely believe that there are essential aspects of film that cannot be adequately understood without it. Among these are film’s power; the nature of film spectatorship; and the characteristics of specific films and genres. Why are we attracted to certain kinds of films—horror films and those depicting violence we abhor? The most basic claim underlying psychoanalytic approaches to film is that the creation and experience of film is driven by desire and wish-fulfilment and functions to satisfy certain psychological, protective, expressive needs of artists and audiences. Psychoanalytic explorations of film tend to draw together aspects of artistic creation and spectatorship, as well as accounts of film’s power to move audiences and the nature of film spectatorship in general—the affective and cognitive significance of the nature of film experience itself.

The Unconscious as Cinematographic Form: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Inception

“…The methodology is comprised of three steps: It identifies the manifest and latent content, interpretates the cinematography, and evaluates of the film's efficacy in transmitting the unconscious dimension. The manifest content is regarded as the overt narrative and visual references, and the latent one as the repressed meaning and inferences (Cox and Levine, 2018). The interpretation of dreams is based in Freud's theory, which posits that dreams are the expression of unconscious desires censored by the conscious mind.…”