Psychiatry and the Cinema
How film has portrayed analysts and psychiatrists, and how psychoanalysis has read film. A film scholar and an analyst writing together.
For trainees in psychiatry who enjoy the cinema, this is an enjoyable and informative text.
The book falls into two movements. The first surveys how Hollywood has staffed its couches: drawing on more than 400 American films, it sorts the screen psychiatrist into recurring figures, the wise healer, the sinister manipulator, the buffoon, the eroticised woman analyst, and tracks how these types shift with each decade's anxieties about the profession. The second turns psychoanalytic film criticism onto individual pictures, reading Casablanca, Alien, Three Women and Good Will Hunting for what they stage beneath the plot.
Krin Gabbard, a film scholar, and Glen Gabbard, an analyst, write as brothers, and the collaboration keeps each register honest. For the clinician the value lies in seeing the profession from outside: the cultural images a patient may carry into a first session, formed long before any referral, and a way of reading a film with the attention usually reserved for a dream.
About the authors
Krin Gabbard
Krin Gabbard is an American scholar of film and of jazz. Born in 1948, he taught for more than three decades in the comparative literature department at Stony Brook University, where he became professor and focused much of his work on cinema and music. His books include Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema, Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture, and Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture. With his brother, the psychoanalyst Glen O. Gabbard, he co-wrote Psychiatry and the Cinema.
Glen Owens Gabbard
Glen O. Gabbard is an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, born in 1949. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and a training and supervising analyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies. His work centres on psychodynamic psychiatry, professional boundary violations, and the psychotherapies. He has authored or edited many books and papers, including texts on psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, physician health, and depictions of mental illness in film.
Details
- 1987
- American Psychiatric Press
- American Psychiatric Press, Second edition
- 440
- 9780880489645