Jungian Film Studies: The essential guide (Jung: The Essential Guides)

Adventure films and stories are always popular because they offer a less risky way to experience death and rebirth, through heroes we can identify with.

Cinematic and television narratives are only useful when they are treated as guides, not as complete substitutes for the actual individuation process.

change. It is important not to oversimplify Jung’s ideas, and not to use them as tools for the reductive analysis of film texts which could otherwise be amplified – i.e. examined in a ‘respectful’ manner taking into consideration the complexity and independence of unconscious processes behind both filmmaking and film viewing.

He refers to this as the ‘third image’ – not the image on the screen, nor the image that arises from the work of interpretative activity, but a third image that exists in the space between viewer and screen – analogous to the intersubjective space between client and therapist.

For instance, ‘dying-and-rising god’ is an archetype, but Osiris, Dionysus and Jesus are archetypal images.

In this sense, the cinema is one way that contemporary society keeps the symbolic life and mythological world alive.

Put simply, the meaning of an image is not fixed.

Moreover ‘the real problem with applying the monomyth to a female hero’s journey is that her “return” is particularly problematic. There is no leadership role for her to step into. There is no kingdom (queendom) for her to rule

Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic

As a place where the unconscious and conscious meet, cinema offers the potential for imagery that is psychologically potent, meaningful and that plays a role in our personal psychological development. It is not at all unusual for people to have strong attachments to individual films, or for films to crop up in personal therapy to good psychological