‘Without balance you transgress your limits without noticing

Watching a movie at the cinema involves a similar containment: attendance at a special place set apart from daily life and always in darkness, staying for a length of time bracketed by the time taken to screen the film, and – like church but unlike therapy – all done in the company of others as a collective experience, all eyes trained in the same

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

Luis Buñuel is quoted as saying: A film is like an involuntary imitation of a dream … On the screen, as within the human being, the nocturnal voyage into the unconscious begins … The cinema seems to have been invented to express the life of the subconscious, the roots of which penetrate poetry so deeply.

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.

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

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

‘The movies are far more efficient than the theatre: they are less restricted, they are able to produce amazing symbols to show the collective unconscious, since their methods of presentation are so unlimited’

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)