Film and the Construction of Memory in Psychoanalysis, 1940–1960

Abstract

ArgumentThis paper explores the relationship between the medium of motion-picture film and the representation of autobiographical memory during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The paper argues that a reciprocal relationship developed between film and memory, in which film was understood as an externalized form of memory, and memory an internalized record of personal experience similar in many respects to film. Memory was often represented as an object-like entity, preserved in stable form within the body, and able to be extracted by the right stimulus or trigger. A particularly important community in which this representation was developed was psychotherapeutic practitioners with psychoanalytic orientations, particularly during and shortly after the Second World War. In special circumstances, therapists and others claimed, records of past life events could be projected, film-like, onto the screen of an individual's conscious, replaying previous experiences in real time. The paper develops a social historical account of this relationship, and reflects on its significance for the history of selfhood in the twentieth century.

Boundaries of reasoning in cases: The visual psychoanalysis of René Spitz

“…Following an increase in newsreels and mental health films during World War II, film began to be portrayed as a more straightforwardly mechanical record of the external world. 16 It could capture and contain the passage of time more accurately than the paintbrush or photographic camera (Winter, 2006: 114). For instance, the leading American developmental lab during and immediately following the war, the Yale Child Study Center, created a film lab that attempted to eliminate all contact between researcher and subject.…”

Brainwashing the cybernetic spectator: The Ipcress File, 1960s cinematic spectacle and the sciences of mind

“…The interactions between the mind sciences, mind control and the apparatus of audio-visual media have previously been explored by historians such as Stefan Andriopoulos, Andreas Killen and Alison Winter (Andriopoulos, 2008, 2011; Killen, 2011, 2012; Killen and Andriopoulos, 2011; Winter, 2004, 2006, 2012). My argument raises for discussion how postwar visions of the human mind, such as those informed by cybernetics and neuroscience, could, in the 1960s, guide and reflect the constantly evolving relationship between the mind sciences, mass media and popular fantasies about influence.…”