Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2015, 60, 1, 132–136

Analytical psychology and cinema

Helena Bassil-Morozow, University of Bedfordshire, UK

For a long time, Jung had been an unwelcome name at film and media
conferences, short of unmentionable. Seen as conservative, apolitical,
antiscientific, bizarre and obscure, Jungian theory has been ignored by cultural
studies for decades. Only the idea of the archetype has more or less managed
to establish itself as a critical term. As one young (and a little overambitious)
film scholar told me recently, with a smile, ‘Jung? To analyse films?
Interesting idea; never heard of it’. In a way, using Jung to analyse film
narratives is an equivalent to thinking outside the box—to challenge the
established norm.
All the while, in the past 20 years or so, the film industry itself has been
influenced by Jungian and post-Jungian ideas and concepts. Christopher
Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (1998/
2007), became the widely-acclaimed cookbook for creating ‘perfect’,
commercially viable narratives securing large audiences. True, Jungian ideas,
particularly coupled with Joseph Campbell’s structuralist analysis of fairytale
motifs, make for a powerful tool of psychological influence which the
Hollywood machine can use to secure big financial returns. ‘A narrative
cookbook’ is the kind of phenomenon that is capable of attracting more
attention to Jungian psychology than years of academic monographs and
scholarly articles. Despite its controversy, Vogler’s book demonstrates the
practical aspect of analytical psychology—and primarily, via the concept of
individuation, its applicability to human experience.

A brief overview of the field

Even though Jungian and post-Jungian concepts are still new to most academics
and film critics, things are gradually changing, and Jungian film studies is a now
a fast-growing academic field. It has taken two main directions: narrative
analysis (John Izod, Terrie Waddell, Helena Bassil-Morozow, Catriona Miller)
and phenomenological criticism (Luke Hockley, Greg Singh). One of the
pioneers of the field, the filmmaker and theorist Christopher Hauke, can be

0021-8774/2015/6001/132 © 2015, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12135
Analytical psychology and cinema 133

said to explore both how films are made and their effect on the audience; both
their narrative and phenomenological aspects.
The narrative group has traditionally been paying more attention to the
structural, symbolic and semiotic heritage of Jungian thought, while the
phenomenological cluster is more interested in the meaning-making and
therapeutic properties of the cinematic experience. In fact, the two groups
have been doing important work by exploring film from two complementary
angles: the making of the structure and the birth of meaning. Both are firmly
rooted in Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious as both a source of
emotional trouble and a well of therapeutic experience. They also share the
central Jungian interest in the ‘individuating golden mean’—the border
between the personal and the collective in human experiences. One of the
central institutions of modern life, due to its mass characters and
technological possibilities, the visual image offers limitless opportunities for
examining and negotiating this border.
One of the first authors to explore the usefulness of Jungian theory for film
studies was Don Fredericksen. In his article ‘Jung/Sign/Symbol/Film’ (1979),
Fredericksen maps out the differences between Freudian and Jungian
psychology regarding creativity and works of art. It is the battle between
the semiotic and the symbolic attitudes—the first interprets narrative
elements and metaphors as signs, and the second as symbols. The
difference between the two lies in the amount of interpretive freedom, and
in the number of interpretations possible for each symbol. Following Jung,
Fredericksen hopes to demonstrate ‘our need and our capacity to be open
to meaning—filmic and otherwise—of a kind and in places where semiotic
attitudes have not previously found it’ (Hauke & Alister 2001, p. 17).
Fredericksen insists that fashionable interpretations and notions of meaning,
instead of expanding and enlightening the world, make it look narrow, and
by this narrowness ‘we are denying ourselves a sense of meaning—and a
wisdom—at once very old and very alive in the contemporary world,
including the world of film’ (2005, p. 17).
Another pioneer of Jungian Film Studies is John Izod. His more recent
publications include Myth, Mind and the Screen: Understanding the Heroes of
Our Time (2001) and Screen, Culture, Psyche: А Post-Jungian Approach to
Working With the Audience (2006). Izod draws his analyses of screen texts
on the concepts of individuation, archetypal imagery and creative possibilities
of the unconscious. For instance, in Screen, Culture, Psyche (2006), he traces
character transformation throughout Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut
(1999), Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty (1996), The Dreamers (2003),
Besieged (1998), and Andrew Niccol’s Simone (2002). He also discusses the
use of myths in British documentaries of the 1980s and 1990s, and the
mythology and archetypalism of the Western.
Izod’s writing can be grouped together with two other Jungian film authors:
Terrie Waddell and Helena Bassil-Morozow. Terrie is a former actress, and
134 Helena Bassil-Morozow

now an academic author and lecturer. Her publications include a range of edited
collections and monographs, most notable being Mis/takes: Archetype, Myth
and Identity in Screen Fiction (2006) and Wild/lives: Trickster, Place and
Liminality on Screen (2009). In these books, Waddell explores a range of
archetypes (and particularly their female incarnations) in contemporary film
and television. For instance, in Mis/takes Waddell discusses the ways in which
contemporary mythology, as outlined in film, reflects the identity issues of the
individual as well as the fundamental problems of contemporary society. Her
task is ‘to examine the way that identity is disrupted and developed in
contemporary film and television and involves drawing on the core archetypal
patterns central to [Jung’s] understanding of the psyche and mythology’
(Waddell 2006, p. 1).
Helena Bassil-Morozow is another author who concentrates on the
archetypal aspect of visual narratives. Her publications on film include the
monographs Tim Burton: the Monster and the Crowd (2010), The Trickster
in Contemporary Film (2012) and The Trickster and the System: Identity and
Agency in Contemporary Society (2015). Like many post-Jungian authors,
her research is based on the premise that mass media is a direct reflection of
the collective psyche. More immediate and accessible than any other art form,
it faithfully reflects the emotional and intellectual condition of the
contemporary Western individual. Interestingly enough, both Waddell and
Bassil-Morozow concentrate in their works on the trickster figure, as it
reflects the spirit of post-industrial time and shows the changes in the
collective psyche more faithfully than any other image. The trickster is pure
change, pure movement, which makes him a suitable metaphor for the
description of the fast-paced environments and lifestyles of Western societies.
In the world of Jungian film criticism, Christopher Hauke’s vision of cinema
is probably the most all-encompassing as he is an academic author and lecturer,
a filmmaker and a psychotherapist. The two collections he co-edited with his
colleagues, Ian Alister and Luke Hockley, respectively, Jung and Film: Post-
Jungian Takes on the Moving Image (2001) and Jung and Film II: the Return
(2011), brought together a range of Jungian film scholars in the hope to
outline the emerging academic discipline.
In his most recent book, Visible Mind: Movies, Modernity and the
Unconscious (2014), Christopher Hauke discusses films in terms of their
mythological value for the contemporary individual. He argues that cinematic
narratives hold therapeutic value, which is as generally symbolic as it is
dependent on personal circumstances. Cinematic narratives, Hauke states, are
contemporary versions of eternal myths. People have always used tales as
meaning-making devices, and moving images are particularly good for this
purpose. Cinema has the possibility ‘of becoming an imaginal space’ and film
watching offers ‘a special place where psyche can come alive, be experienced
and be commented upon’ (Hauke 2014, p. 4). Moreover, as self-discovery is
often a complex and painful process, ‘popular cultural forms such as cinema
Analytical psychology and cinema 135

can provide the holding necessary for intense experiences, making them more
accessible and more bearable’ (ibid., p. 4).
Luke Hockley and Greg Singh can be said to comprise the
‘phenomenological’ wing of Jungian Film Studies, which is more interested in
the ways film images influence the audience than in the narrative construction
aspect of films. They write about a number of issues concerning emotional
exchange between the screen and the audience: construction of meaning;
therapeutic effect of cinematic narratives; projective-introjective exchange;
and identity and identification in relation to screen images.
Hockley’s works on film are informed by his experience as a psychotherapist
as he uses films in his private practice. In his monographs, he explores the
affective power of cinema and television. In Frames of Mind: A Post-Jungian
Look at Cinema, Television and Technology (2007), Hockley rightly notes
that academic film theory surprisingly paid little attention to viewers’
emotional relationships with the mobbing image (Hockley 2007, p. 35). In
Somatic Cinema (2014), he further investigates the relationship between affect
evoked in an individual in the process of watching a movie, and the meaning
arising out of this experience. Hockley argues (in line with Jung’s view of
symbols) that any meaning produced by on-screen imagery is both powerful
and personal.
Similarly, Greg Singh’s approach to cinema focuses on the affective nature of
film viewing—and particularly on the power that affect has on individuals and
personality development. In his book Feeling Film: Affect and Authenticity in
Popular Cinema (2014), Singh argues that cinema is an ideal candidate ‘for
thinking through the expressive potential of cultural production from a
psychological perspective’ because, being ‘psychomimetic’, it reflects the
relationship human beings have with the outside world (Singh 2014, p. 11).
Overall, analytical psychology is a versatile toolbox, and has a lot to offer to
film criticism apart from (and beyond) the concept of individuation and the
hero myth. It can be used to discuss the semiotic/symbolic division; the
dichotomy between the universality of the symbol and the personal meanings
it generates; the fleeting nature of meaning and affect; the psychological value
of the hero myth; the relationship between the social and the personal in
cinematic narratives; and the nature of the creative process—be it the process
of making a film or the process of watching one.

References
Bassil-Morozow, H. (2010). Tim Burton: The Monster and the Crowd. London:
Routledge
——— (2012). The Trickster in Contemporary Film. London: Routledge.
——— (2015). Identity and Agency in Contemporary Society. London & New York:
Routledge.
Fredericksen, D. (1979). ‘Jung/Sign/Symbol/Film’ In Jung and Film: Post-Jungian Takes
on the Moving Image. (2001), eds. I. Alister & C. Hauke. London: Routledge, 17–55.
136 Helena Bassil-Morozow

Hauke, C. (2000). Jung and the Postmodern: The Interpretation of Realities. London
and Philadelphia: Routledge.
Hauke, C. & Alister, I. (2001). Jung & Film, Post-Jungian Takes on the Moving Image.
East Sussex: Brunner-Routledge.
Hauke, C. (2005). Human Being Human: Culture and the Soul. London: Routledge.
——— (2014). Visible Mind: Movies, Modernity and the Unconscious. London:
Routledge.
Hauke, C. & Hockley, L. (2011). Jung & Film 11: The Return, Further Post-Jungian
Takes on the Moving Image. London & New York: Routledge.
Hockley, L. (2001). Cinematic Projections: The Analytical Psychology of C.G. Jung and
Film Theory. London: University of Luton Press.
——— (2007). Frames of Mind: A Post-Jungian Look at Cinema, Television and
Technology. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect.
——— (2014) Somatic Cinema. London: Routledge.
Izod, J. (2001). Myth, Mind and Screen: Understanding the Heroes of Our Time.
London: Routledge.
——— (2006). Screen, Culture, Psyche: A Post-Jungian Approach to Working with the
Audience. London: Routledge.
Singh, G. (2009). Film After Jung: Post-Jungian Approaches to Film Theory. London:
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——— (2014). Feeling Film: Affect and Authenticity in Popular Cinema. Hove:
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Vogler, C. (1998/2007). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. London:
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Waddell, T. (2006). Mis/takes: Archetype, Myth and Identity in Screen Fiction. London
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——— (2009). Wild/Lives: Trickster, Place and Liminality on Screen. London:
Routledge.