ABSTRACT
Claude Chabrol, the highly respected French film director, once explained why he collaborated with a psychoanalyst on one of his films: "It's very hard, when you deal with characters, not to use the Freudian grid, because the Freudian grid is composed of signs that also apply to the cinema" (Feinstein, 1996, p. 82). Indeed, since the birth of psychoanalysis, which closely coincided with the birth of the cinema, the two fields have been closely linked. As early as 1900, a writer would describe his psychotic episode in terms of the "magic lantern" effects of the nickelodeons (Schneider, 1985). In fact, the Lumiere brothers first invented a rudimentary film projector in 1895, the same year that "Studies on Hysteria" by Breuer and Freud appeared.
