An evening of film and psychoanalysis at the Freud Museum

With Christopher Clulow, Martha Doniach, Krisztina Glausius, Katalin Lanczi, Perrine Moran, Anne Patterson and Kate Thompson

Come and join us for an evening exploring the relationship between film and psychoanalysis. Like dreams, films can reveal what lies beneath the surface of conscious life: hidden anxieties, conflicts, desires, and defences. Through image, atmosphere, silence, sound, and narrative, cinema gives form to unconscious processes that are often difficult to articulate directly.

Psychoanalytic thinking allows us to consider not only what characters say and do, but also what is defended against, disavowed, or left unspoken. Films can vividly portray the defensive structures that shape psychic and relational life. For example, The Zone of Interest confronts us with the operation of denial and psychic splitting, showing the capacity to maintain ordinary domestic life alongside the exclusion of unbearable reality. Other films illuminate dynamics within couples and families, including projection, idealisation, dependency, aggression, and the tension between intimacy and separateness.

Observing these processes condensed within a film narrative can deepen our understanding of the complexities we encounter in clinical work. In the consulting room, analytic boundaries protect both therapist and patient from becoming overwhelmed by unconscious material. Watching films, however, allows us to enter emotional and psychic worlds more freely, creating space to reflect on states of mind and relational dynamics from a different perspective.

During the evening, we will present reviews and articles from the special issue of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis on “Couples and Families in Film.” Authors who contributed to the issue will give brief presentations and participate in the discussion. Clips from The Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall, Return to Seoul and one other film will be shown and discussed interactively.

We warmly invite the audience to share their own reflections on films that have informed their clinical thinking, and to consider together how psychoanalytic ideas can deepen our experience and understanding of cinema.

For full details, including CPD credits information and booking, visit TR Together

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