ABSTRACT
Historians of cinema are quick to note that in the 1970s and 1980s many critical studies of psychoanalytical orientation were built upon a process called reading through fi lm. Based on the concept of working through, it referred to what Freud had made famous in the name of Durcharbeitung, the way that a person in treatment might cope with the diffi culties of being alive: how he or she would address the traumas that make life what it is.1 It went without saying that the relation of the fi lm to the viewer was felt to be not unlike that of the analyst and analysand. Cinema became what Félix Guattari called “the poor man’s divan,” the place where the images of a fi lm prompted viewers to sort through their own memories in order to come to terms-and since by its nature analysis is interminable, never quite to term-with themselves.2 Spectators who took soundings of their own memories by way of fi lms could afford analysis in the camera obscura of the movie theater.3
