Visible Mind: Movies, modernity and the unconscious

Powerful emotions remain in the shadow and denied to the rest of the personality, initially, out of the fear that they could bring about our complete disintegration.

the experience of film offers a special place where psyche can come alive, be experienced and be commented upon. Often the experiences sought and encountered in therapy can be both intense and painful, and for this reason they are often defended against and avoided in daily life. Popular cultural forms such as cinema can provide the holding necessa

Berry reckons that, ‘the act of filming creates or perhaps releases the “psyche” of the subject. The scene is no longer simply nature, but art …we are magnetized by it’

Whenever conscious life becomes one-sided or adopts a false attitude, these images ‘instinctively’ rise to the surface in dreams and in the visions of artists and seers to restore the psychic balance, whether of the individual or of the epoch. In this way the work of the artist meets the psychic needs of the society in which he lives … (Jung

In film, as in no other medium, we can actually see the behavior of the archetype; in life, we know her far more indirectly, as moods, impulses, symptoms, and as a shape-shifting personage in our dreams … In film, we can see the anima figure over time, in a more or less stable guise, at her strange task of mediating the fate of a protagonist. (Beeb

Myth, Mind, and the Screen: Understanding the Heroes of Our Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Movies can be surprising in their ability to stir and transport thoughts and emotions and move the viewer to change or transcend their lives.

Cinema as temenos has the possibility of becoming an imaginal space: by engaging with films a version of active imagination is stimulated which can then engage the unconscious

‘Only what is human and what you call banal and hackneyed contains the wisdom that you seek’.

such as the feminine in himself, the banal, the popularised, the irrational and magic – all that Jung consciously rejected but now finds he has to include in his being.