The Florida Project is about a young girl and her mother. It is about an intergenerational trauma set within the context of American poverty, with specific elements that, until our concerns about family separation at the US southern border, were associated primarily with women: child removal from a parent by the government. It also is … [Read more…]
Trauma
Hiroshima Mon Amour – Confronting Unbearable Loss
Writing nearly 100 years ago in Mourning and Melancholia, around 1915 – 1917, Freud was developing his ideas about narcissism. He was able to push his thinking further by exploring the difference between normal mourning and pathological melancholia. Freud’s thinking on this topic contributed to his formulation of super ego and the sense of guilt, … [Read more…]
Evil, Trauma, Post Traumatic Stress: Martha Marcy May Marlene
This year, Psychoanalysis and Cinema explores the concept of evil. As a culture, we tend to delegate evil to deviants and despots, people who are comfortably different from you and me. For those of us in this psychoanalytic extension program, being involved with or interested in psychoanalysis, we tend to think of behavior, including evil behavior, as emanating from the inner life, with evil deeds coming from people who are inherently if sometimes understandably flawed. What if the line between extreme evil and good is more permeable? What if, under certain kinds of circumstances, many if not most people could be induced to perform atrocities? What if evil can be called forth by the situation, by specific sets of circumstances that few could resist?