Comparing Cinema And Psychoanalysis

In Chapter 3 of Opening Skinner’s Box, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” Lauren Slater discusses the contentious issue psychiatrists faced in 1972 after psychologist David Rosenhan conducted his most famous experiment, proving how psychiatrists already label patients when they walk through the door to be evaluated. The author, Slater is a psychologist herself in which her writing in this chapter is supportive to Rosenhan’s findings. This may limit supporting arguments on crediting psychiatric conceptualization. The meaning of behavior can easily be misunderstood, a patient can be diagnosed according to the doctor’s capacity of knowledge to specific behaviors.

In this essay, I shall try to illustrate whether analysing the movie Rear Window as a classical example of the Freudian concept of voyeurism, is appropriate. Voyeurism is defined in The Penguin dictionary of psychology as:

To support this idea, Bordwell illustrates how art cinema motivates its narratives differently, through two principles: realism and authorial expressivity. Firstly he proposes the notion that art films reflect realism in their characters, space, and time. Psychologically complex characters are present in real worlds dealing with true-to-life situations. Art cinema is concerned with the characters ‘reaction’ to these situations, rather than their ‘action’. Thus it bares an element of psychological subjectivity as the characters survey the world they are in, which aids the realisation of the distress of

By the 1870s, there were two schools of hypnosis in France. One was run by Dr. Jean Martin Charcot and the other by Doctors Benheim and Liebalt. Around the same time, Sigmund Freud also became interested in hypnosis and visited Benheim and Leibalt’s clinics to learn their techniques. Freud was the first to recognise the importance of the subconscious in psychological disorders, but he later became disillusioned with hypnosis and turned his attentions to psychoanalysis. As a result, the use of psychoanalysis grew in popularity during the first half of the 20th century and with this rise, hypnotherapy became less popular. By the 1950s this situation began to reverse as new research found new uses and positive benefits for using hypnosis as a therapy. Milton Erickson (1901-1980) was a psychotherapist who used hypnosis in his work. Erickson believed that the unconscious mind was

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was also interested in hypnosis at this time. He was using it in his work, but eventually abandoned it in favour of psychoanalysis. With the rise of psychoanalysis in the first half of this century, hypnosis declined in popularity.

Even though Freud's family had limited finances and were forced to live in a crowded apartment, his parents made every effort to foster his obvious intellectual capacities. In 1881 Freud received his doctorate and started work under Jean-Martin Charcot (Rana 97). Freud practiced and observed hypnosis as a clinical technique, and began to formulate the beginnings of his theory on the mind. There were no unusual aspects to Freuds childhood that seem to guide him in his rationing of thinking for his theories. Freuds parents realized that he would be a scholarly child and tried to accommodate him with a solid education.

Freud’s theories have launched what is now known as the psychoanalytic approach to literature. Freud was interested in writers, especially those who depended largely on symbols. Such writers tend to tinge their ideas and figures with mystery or ambiguity that only make sense once interpreted, just as the analyst tries to figure out the dreams and bizarre actions that the unconscious mind of a neurotic releases out of repression. A work of literature is thus treated as a fantasy or a dream that Freudian analysis comes to explain the nature of the mind that produced it. The purpose of a work of art is what psychoanalysis has found to be the purpose of the dream: the secret gratification of an infantile and forbidden wish that has been repressed into the unconscious (Wright 765).

The film I chose to watch is the original Psycho, filmed in 1960 and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The stars of the cast included Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Martin Balsam. (IMDB.com, 2006) The story begins about a young woman named Marion Crane from Arizona who is fed up with her life and longs to marry her boyfriend, Sam. Unfortunately, the couple has little money and cannot marry. One Friday afternoon, she is asked to deposit forty-thousand dollars for her boss. Seeing the money as an opportunity to start a new life with her lover, she takes off for California with the money. She ends up becoming tired from the drive and pulls into the Bates Motel. Unfortunately for Marion, the owner of the motel, Norman

Today, mental illness has been the scapegoat for most crimes today. From mass shootings to bombings, most people have blamed mental illness for the cause of these crimes. Moreover, even some defense attorneys have even had cases in which they claimed their client had a mental illness in order to receive a lesser sentence. However, in order to truly understand mental illness, we must first look at the history of people studying the brain. The history of the study of the brain, psychology, dates back to ancient Greece. By using the scientific reasoning, Hippocrates speculated that human temperament can vary by a person's physical qualities, such as yellow bile or too much blood (Smith). Many philosophers during this time period might have only

Many critics have noticed that Mulvey’s application of psychoanalysis and filmmaking appears in an ironic return to Freud and Jacques Lacan. Mulvey uses the gaze to examine male pleasure in narrative cinema, but Lacan

Sigmund Freud created strong theories in science and medicine that are still studied today. Freud was a neurologist who proposed many distinctive theories in psychiatry, all based upon the method of psychoanalysis. Some of his key concepts include the ego/superego/id, free association, trauma/fantasy, dream interpretation, and jokes and the unconscious. “Freud remained a determinist throughout his life, believing that all vital phenomena, including psychological phenomena like thoughts, feelings and phantasies, are rigidly determined by the principle of cause and effect” (Storr, 1989, p. 2). Through the discussion of those central concepts, Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis becomes clear as to how he construed human character.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is responsible for developing the Psychoanalytic Theoretical Perspective; Freud argued that our early life experiences are essentially the base to our subconscious mind and in turn heavily influence our current behavior. Freud believed that people could be treated and healed by articulating their dreams and childhood memories allowing an individual to gain insight into these unconscious thoughts and ultimately motivate them to resolve the repressed conflicts within. This technique was developed into a therapy used today known as Psychoanalysis, similar to hypnosis, it was founded in 1896 (“Freud's Psychoanalytic Theories.”). Just like any other psychological theory, there are many interesting concepts to Freud's Psychoanalytic Theoretical Perspective. The theory says that your personality is determined by the manner in which your behaviors have been depicted to the unconscious mind, this theory tells us that our behavior is completely

Sigmund Freud explored many new concepts in the human mind during his lifetime. He was the scholar who discovered an immense new realm of the mind, the unconscious. He was the philosopher who identified childhood experience, not racial destiny or family fate, as the vessel of character, and he is the therapist who invented a specific form of treatment for mentally ill people, psychoanalysis. This advanced the revolutionary notion that actual diagnosable diseases can be cured by a technology that dates to the dawn of humanity: speaking. Sigmund Freud, writing more than 320 books, articles and essays on psychotherapy in his lifetime, forever changed how society viewed mental illness and the meaning of their dreams. However, controversy over

This paper looks at the movie; A Dangerous Method directed by David Cronenberge is based on true life events that happened on the eve of the World War 1. This movie brings out the theories, techniques, and the central characters in the early history of psychoanalysis. It brings out the effectiveness of psychoanalysis method and shows the risks and dangers encountered when entering the unconscious mind. This movie takes a look at these through the life of Carl Jung who was one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis. It also takes a glimpse into the turbulent relationship between a doctor, his mentor, and his patient. The paper will begin by giving a short

Sigmund Freud was the discoverer and inventor of psychoanalysis and coined the term in 1896 after publishing studies on Hysteria with Joseph Breuer in 1895. Psychoanalysis still remains unsurpassed in its approach to understanding human motivation, character development, and psychopathology. Freud’s insights and analyses of psychic determinism, early childhood sexual development, and unconscious processes have left an indelible mark on psychology (Korchin, 1983).