ABSTRACT
In our clinical work, psychoanalysis provides us with the wherewithal to raise unexplored or repressed areas of the psyche and emotions to the level of consciousness.
What can it give us when we watch a film? Immersed in the dark, in the dreamlike atmosphere of the cinema, intent on watching the flickering images together with the rest of the audience, the analyst finds himself in the ideal situation to use the tools of his work to facilitate the workings of the preconscious. Certain visual images provide a fresh representative stimulus which enables the analyst to make contact with parts of the self. A partially or totally inhibited representative process – or one which had remained unknown or ‘deactivated’ – can then be set in motion again thanks to the evocative force of the moving pictures and the complexities of the cinema as an artistic form, with its ever more sophisticated techniques, encompassing words, music, noise, sounds and silence. It becomes the means to carry on the mind’s journey from sensations and perceptions to representation, providing a continual flow of ‘representations of things’. From this viewpoint, cinema can reactivate the representation function, enriching it and presenting (or re-presenting) aspects which would otherwise remain obscure.1
