ABSTRACT
When the early analysts began their project of delving into the realms of the psyche and mapping out the territory, film was in its infancy. Now film is a major cultural reference point in our lives, and as such can be used in order to illustrate the inner worlds it so powerfully depicts, from a psychoanalytic perspective. Using a particular film, Morvern Callar, directed by Lynne Ramsay (2002) to reflect on the impact of the counter-transference, the feelings generated in the clinician or observer by what is ‘projected’, I suggest that film, with its capacity to communicate intense emotional and preverbal states, can make sense of certain key psychoanalytic concepts via a direct emotional experience.
