Visible Mind: Movies, modernity and the unconscious

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

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.

Here are a few pitfalls to avoid. Jung pioneered the idea of archetypes, so let’s go and find archetypes in films, for example the shadow, the anima and the wise old man.