PART II The retreat in film

The films considered in the chapters that follow are concerned with a stage of dramatic psychical change in the lives of their protagonists. This difficult stage of growth involves a gesture of retreat, a circumscribed space and time. It is my claim that this space and time of retreat is closely connected with the protagonists’ internal world, and that in it can be recognized traces of the early maternal relationship. It is noteworthy that the mother as a character is absent in most of these films; but, if I can put it this way, her absence is felt as a presence. The mother’s presence is felt through these traces that pertain to a prenatal or a preverbal relationship with her. The mother’s absence in relation to the development of thinking was considered in Chapter 1, and in Chapter 2 psychical growth was discussed in relation to a state of complete receptiveness to the emotional experience of the present moment. In this second part of the book, the conceptualization of ‘retreat as caesura’ requires some important distinctions to be made. The thinking and becoming activity that was explored in previous chapters can certainly be found in these films, but some aspects of the caesura and of the struggles that emotionally turbulent growth more generally can entail will bring to the fore other situations and phenomena. The caesura is linked to a prenatal stage in which physical and mental life are not yet differentiated, to certain feelings or physical impulses for which there is not yet an appropriate mental representation. There is thus a difficulty in translating or communicating these feelings. At certain points in these films the struggles of dramatic growth involve hallucinations, catatonic states, omnipotent narcissism or intrusive processes of identification; but I aim to show that at the basis of the protagonists’ gesture of retreat can be discerned the activity of the epistemophilic instinct, that there is a sense of the protagonists’ wish to engage with both the external and the internal worlds, and that through the experience of the retreat they eventually achieve a more integrated view of these worlds.