Abstract
When the early analysts began their project of delving into the realms of the psyche and mapping out the territory, film was in its infancy. Now film is a major cultural reference point that can be used to illustrate the inner worlds it so powerfully depicts from a psychoanalytic perspective. Using a particular film, Morvem Callar (Lynne Ramsay, UK, 2002), to reflect on the impact of the counter-transference, the feelings generated in the clinician or observer by what is ‘projected’, I suggest that film, with its capacity to communicate intense emotional and pre-verbal states, can make sense of certain key psychoanalytic concepts via a direct emotional experience.
A more extended version of this chapter was originally published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy (2010), 26 (1), and won the Jan Lee Memorial Prize for the best paper in that year linking psychoanalysis with the arts.
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© 2014 Judith Edwards
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Edwards, J. (2014). Film Projection and Projective Identification: Film as a Teaching Tool. In: Bainbridge, C., Yates, C. (eds) Media and the Inner World: Psycho-cultural Approaches to Emotion, Media and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345547_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345547_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46655-9
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