Some Context: Quite simply, the world is not what it was ten or fifteen years ago let alone in 1895 when Freud and Breuer’s book Studies in Hysteria, the precursor to psychoanalysis proper, was published. Though born in the age of what some have called the second industrial revolution, …
Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is a psychological film, while at the same time it’s a film about psychology. No, not today’s psychology that has become denuded of adventure: a discipline obsessed with legitimising itself with outcome measures, random control trials (RCTs), and mind-numbing narrow-focus experimentation. This was a more …
Fifty years ago Bond broke his way onto our screens with Dr. No. I’ll do the maths for you: it was 1962. To put it in cinematic context, that places it neatly between two Hitchcock classics, Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963). Two films that rely heavily on old school …
This week the US version of the iconic Stanley Kubric film The Shining has been re-released in the UK. As the recent Telegraph review by Tim Robey explains, this version is like a “reverse director’s cut”. After lacklustre reviews following the original opening in 1980 in the US, the meticulous …
“Breaking up is hard to do” or so the classic Neil Sedaka song tells us. It’s true. Coming out of a relationship is a loss. It challenges our attachment patterns, makes us reassess our lives, crushes our self-esteem for a time, while making us feel pretty raw and awful – …
The distinction between what is conscious and what is unconscious is a familiar one – Freud gave us the image of an iceberg where the small exposed bit represents the conscious mind and the much larger unexposed chunk underneath represents the unconscious. An even a more moving picture of the …
In anticipation of watching Ridley Scott’s new film Prometheus, I thought it was time to go back to Scott’s original film Alien, and subject it to a Kleinian analysis. In a previous post I explained that Kleinian analysis is rarely used in the interpretation of film and then went on …
What really motivates people to tweet? What do you get out of it? There are a series of conscious reasons why you might tweet. Perhaps it’s a handy way to communicate with your network of friends; the most expedient way in which you can build a network of similar tastes or interests; maybe you want …
There are currently a lot of headlines telling us that Facebook is making us narcissistic, or that social networking really is geared for exhibitionists and extraverts. We are told that shy people use Facebook more than those that are not shy (presumably because “connection” is easier this way), and even that …
Psychotherapy is widely seen as being a bit backward. Psychoanalysis (one of many forms of psychotherapy) is often seen as the most backward of the lot; anachronistic, old fashioned, unscientific: a dinosaur. You might be surprised to know that when “the talking cure” first emerged at the end of the …
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