By looking into the cinema screen, viewers also look into themselves and in the midway point between their bodies and the screen they experience the third image. As a result it is quite possible for viewers to suddenly have an intensely personal … reaction to a film that others in the audience do not have.

One analyst told me of a client who grew up in a family where no one was allowed to watch anything except cartoons. It was as if the whole family had not grown up. When she was depressed, the client watched cartoons all day. She eventually confessed how she would be terrified to watch a romantic comedy; the idea of going to the video store and

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 movies are far more efficient than the theatre: they are less restricted, they are able to produce symbols to show the collective unconscious, since their methods of presentation are so unlimited. (Jung 1984: 12)

‘The loss I could not acknowledge in my own life I could recognise and react to onscreen’

You cannot at the same time be on the mountain and in the valley, but your way leads you from mountain to valley and from valley to mountain. Much begins amusingly and leads into the dark. (Jung 2009: 265)

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

When bad things happened to me in real life, I didn't react. I seemed cool or indifferent. Yet in the dark and relative safety of the movie theatre, I would weep over fictional tragedies, over someone else's suffering.

Film uses disorder to create order of another sort … Film's response to modernity a century ago was to bind its chaos into form by crafting it. Our response a century later is identical. Like film, we create reality by framing life's events, focusing on its particulars. Our angles, values, interactions construct the world in which we live. We are