The cinema and psychoanalysis: from set to setting

The cinema and psychoanalysis have often been the subject of study and mutual interest for both directors and psychoanalysts, but what brings them together? The bond between the cinema and psychoanalysis seems to be traceable back to their origins, woven together by seemingly casual events, which are actually the reflection and expression of the collective unconscious matrix of society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Looked at the other way round, the context in which these two disciplines originated may also be seen as the dream product of that same society, which, permeated by anguish due to wars and social changes, now appeared ready to reconsider itself, beginning with the confrontation with its hidden demons. If we were to make an extreme simplification, beyond the more complex analyses of the relationship between the language of the cinema and Freudian theory, what really binds these two languages of the soul so closely together is that they both explore the same subject: the unconscious phantoms which animate the individual’s desires and fears in the incessant search for the intra-psychic origin of the Self and the Ego, which allows for a glimpse of the common substrate that is the unitary matrix of the collective unconscious.

Keywords: Dark, dream, set, setting, screening, identification

Pino Guario, Bianca Maria Rinaldo, Il cinema e la psicoanalisi: dal set al setting in "GRUPPI" 3/2010, pp 131-144, DOI: 10.3280/GRU2010-003012