ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a healing, albeit painful, personal encounter with a recent film War Horse and how it came to ‘unlock’ a long-dissociated pocket of childhood experience. Fifteen years of Jungian analysis with three different analysts and other psychotherapists, had never touched this un-remembered all-too-personal pain, nor had the symptoms which clustered around this dissociated complex ever been satisfactorily interpreted. In this chapter, the author illustrates how modern cinema can provide a via regia (royal road) into the dissociated contents of the unconscious, bypassing resistances and defenses that had cordoned off the relevant material for decades. He explores this ability of cinema to connect us to personal complexes carries important therapeutic implications. The author describes how a dissociated complex of his own forgotten childhood experience was ‘triggered’ by a sequence of dramatic scenes he watched in the film War Horse.
