Introduction

This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is related to the theoretical writing found in Screen during the mid-1970s, and the Althusserian appropriation of Lacanian subject formation. Don Fredericksen, one of the leading proponents of Jungian content analysis in film, has stated that Jungians do not normally differentiate between the three. Fredericksen stated in his International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS) seminar on Jung and Film at Psyche and Imagination that the affinity between film and analytical psychology is such that it is a wonder that there are not more Jungian analysts 'dabbling' in film scholarship, and that there are 'only, maybe, five people doing this'. The attempts to reconcile the need for a theorization of subjectivity in historical materialist analysis with the need for a discussion of socio-historical factors in psychoanalytic film theories address another 'theological' schism, this time within film theory itself.