A Psychoanalytic Tour of “Mulholland Drive”
By Categories: Movies

by Herbert H. Stein

How does a film evoke our emotions? I found my own emotions buffeted about as I watched David Lynch’s film, Mulholland Drive. It can be a difficult film to watch. It appears to be a suspense/mystery story about two young women in danger. But there are strange intrusions into that story that are at times macabre. About three quarters of the way in, the plot dissolves, the characters change identity, and we experience a melange of scenes that suggest a very different story. Interestingly, amidst the confusion, I found myself responding with shifting affects, anxiety for the most of the first part of the film, with a strong feeling of sadness at the end.

Mulholland Drive is structured much like a dream, except that there is no clear identification of a dreamer. It is like a dream experienced rather than a dream remembered. There is no waking up, no available remembered day residue. Continue reading A Psychoanalytic Tour of “Mulholland Drive”

From Steven Reisner: latest developments in the fight against psychologists’ and other health professionals’ involvement in torture
By Categories: Controversial

Dear Colleagues,

Our efforts to restore ethics to our nation’s treatment of detainees and prisoners and to hold accountable those psychologists and other health professionals who created, supervised and implemented the program of abuse and torture are coming to a head. Two weeks ago, Physicians for Human Rights published an extraordinary exposé on the role of health professionals in creating a program of medical research on unwitting prisoners in order to assess the efficacy and ‘legality’ of abusive techniques, including water-boarding. (Full disclosure: I was a co-author of the report. It can be downloaded here.)

Continue reading From Steven Reisner: latest developments in the fight against psychologists’ and other health professionals’ involvement in torture