Click Here to Read: Perversion, Fetish, and Creativity: The Fate of Desire in “Utz” by Anita Weinreb Katz.
An earlier version of this paper was presented on November 8th, 2002, at the colloquium “Looking Out, Looking In: Cinema and Psychoanalysis” sponsored by the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.
I had never heard of It’s a Wonderful Life until one winter night in the early eighties. I was feeling out of sorts. I don’t remember the particular details but I know that I was feeling down, unfulfilled, frustrated, disappointed, perhaps lonely, unconfident, worried and otherwise unhappy. Those who have never felt that way need not read on.
Continue reading “It’s a Wonderful Life”: A Cure for the Holiday Blues
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In recent issues of International Psychoanalysis, I wrote about films, Field of Dreams and Contact, which strongly suggest a fantasy of returning to the womb to meet a father long gone and a mother who died too early to be known. Last month, I wrote about Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon and The Hours which suggest a fantasy in which death offers a reunion with a loving mother and a return to a time of blissful memory. In The Hours, suicide by drowning may be linked with a return to the quiet of the womb. In Pan’s Labyrinth, we have all of these fantasies wrapped up in a family romance.
Rarely, a film maker gives us a gift of a ready made demonstration of a well known psychoanalytic concept. We have recently been given such a gift by the Mexican director, Guillelmo del Toro, whose film, Pan’s Labyrinth, provides us with a complete family romance fantasy. Continue reading A Family Romance Fantasy in “Pan’s Labyrinth”: Magical Wombs pt. IV
INSTITUTE FOR PSYCHOANALYTIC TRAINING AND RESEARCH
Art, Psychoanalysis, and Society Project
Co- sponsored by the Center for Jewish History and YIVO
Space is limited Reservations required
Box office: 917 606-8200
Date: November 4, 2007
Time: 2 –5 PM
Location: Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th St.
New York City
Sunday 4, 2-5pm
Childhood Trauma In Film: Undzere Kinder (Our Children) Film and Workshop: This last Yiddish-language film made in Poland features famous Yiddish comedians Szimon Dzigan and Yisroel Szumacher and a cast of Jewish orphans, survivors of the Holocaust. The film will be used as the basis of a workshop on psychological trauma and its representation in film. Introduced and moderated by Dr. Maurice Preter and Dr. Isaac Tylim with the participation of Dr. Harold J. Bursztajn, Harvard Medical School; Professor Shimon Redlich, Ben-Gurion University; Marek Web, YIVO Historian; Dr. Eva Weil, Paris Psychoanalytic Society; Dr. Eva Kantor, Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, NYC.
Click Here to Read: More About the Movie Undzere Kinder.
Click here to Read: More about Dr. Maurice Preter.
Click here to Read: More about the showing of film sponsored by Instititute for Psychoanlaytic Training and Research, Center for Jewish History, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
In August and September, I published articles on this website on the films, Field of Dreams and Contact. I gave them subtitles, “Magical Womb” Part I and II, respectively. With each, I tried to demonstrate a fantasy of a womb with magical properties to overcome death and separation. In each, the central character is reunited with parents long lost in this magical womb.
Part III concerns two films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Hours in which death is not overcome but itself becomes a path to reunion and to the womb. In each, I hope to demonstrate a fantasy of reunion with a loving mother through death and suicide. In The Hours, there are explicit images of a return to the womb. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has images suggestive only of a return to a blissful reunion with a maternal figure. I will deal more briefly with it than with The Hours, perhaps to return to it at another time. Continue reading Death as Reunion in Two Films: Magical Wombs in Film III
In Field of Dreams, a man is reunited with his long dead father and with the vague images and fantasies that remained of his mother, who had died when he was a small child. Contact, a film released nearly ten years later, makes explicit this theme of reuniting with a father who is long gone and, through him, a mother who is only imagined.
Continue reading “Contact”: A Voyage to Inner Space: Magical Wombs in Film II
