ABSTRACT
During the 1990s, thousands of people each summer traveled to Dyersville, a small farm town in the northeast corner of Iowa in the middle of the United States. It is difficult to account in conventional critical terms for such behavior. The movie somehow touched the soul. Medical psychology shares a common inspiration with literary and film analysis. Psychodynamic literary criticism is almost as old as psychoanalysis itself. A rhetoric of innocence has characterized many films about American sports. Popular tradition holds that the Grail is the cup that contained Christ’s blood at the Last Supper. One of the Grail’s properties in the early texts was its ability to dispense idiosyncratic remedies. The Grail tradition demands that the hero must find the Grail castle and ask the appropriate questions of the Grail King. Healing the wound restores the world and marks the transition to a new psychological condition based on accepting the loss of innocence.
