PsychoCinematics: A Film Seminar Series with Readings

In bringing together the art of film and the art of psychotherapy, PsychoCinematics aims to open new terrain for collaborative and creative conversations about both. Each seminar includes a film showing followed by a presentation and lively discussion led by a facilitator. The films chosen are notable for their exceptional art, style and innovation. They ignite the imagination to dream differently about current issues, both clinical and theoretical, in our field. Adding critical depth and challenge to our collective dreaming, suggested readings of interdisciplinary interest will accompany each seminar.

PsychoCinematics Series Goal:  To identify how the art of film and the art of psychotherapy can enrich and inform one another in ways that will be useful to clinical practice

Objectives for the Series: Through film, discussion, and readings, participants will gain a greater knowledge of the spiritual, philosophical, environmental, historico-political, gender and cultural themes that currently affect our world and practice. Participants will learn how critical film viewing might reveal the ways in which foundational concepts in psychoanalysis are being rethought and sometimes challenged by contemporary, interdisciplinary theory.

Schedule:

 18 September | The Pharmakology of Eros: Phantom Thread

Learning Objectives:

1. To understand what a pharmakon (medicine/poison) is
2. To reflect psychoanalytically on the dynamics of power within unequal erotic relationships
3. To consider how various pharmaka are used consciously and unconsciously to address this inequality and its surrounding charged affects
4. To reflect on how film, psychoanalytic practice, and other tools act as pharmaka in our work

November 13 | Living on this Unsettled Earth: First Reformed 

Learning Objectives:

1. To gain a deeper understanding of how clients process and cope with ecological grief and ecological injustice
2. To gain an understanding of how clients struggle and cope with existential questions of meaning and purpose when the future is overshadowed by inevitable environmental devastation and loss.

This presentation is sponsored by the Society for the Anthropology of Consiousness as part of their 2022 annual meeting on the theme of “Unsettled Lands.”

January 22, 2023 | "I Will Be True to You, Whatever Comes": The Tree of Life

Learning Objectives:

1. To understand how Malick thinks cinematically, that is, not discursively, but within the parameters of cinema as a medium of expression
2. To reflect on Malick’s cinematic thinking as a psychotherapeutic exploration of trauma, one that recalls Job's challenge in the pit and provokes us to ask: is suffering an argument against having been born?

March 19, 2023 | Civil War Returned: The Beguiled

Learning Objectives:

1. To think psychoanalytically about cinematic returns to the past and the various ways sexual difference can figure into such returns
2. To think psychoanalytically about representations of racial difference and white femininity in U.S history, particularly in light of Coppola's choice not to include the Black female character who appears in earlier iterations of The Beguiled.

May 14, 2023 | Some Notes on the Melodrama: Volver and the Return of the Repressed

Learning Objectives:

1. To identify common themes, tropes and conventions of the melodrama
2. To explain the paradox of the melodrama’s subversive quality, its resistance to the social structures and values it seems to valorize
3. To articulate the way in which Heidegger’s concept of Dasein informs a particularly feminine “ethic of care” in the melodrama
4. To identify several ways in which the melodramatic mise-en-scène becomes a vehicle for the expression of neurotic symptoms