BERGSTROM, Janet, Endless Night

«Such distance and disinterest notwithstanding, to think about cinema and psychoanalysis today is a substantial undertaking, the histories of the two extending across a century of multiple and complex interactions, one-sided or not. "Cinema and psychoanalysis", moreover, can be a way of enclosing and delimiting a topic that should, on the contrary, be opened up to areas of concern that are not typically taken – by film studies at least – central. There is need, for example, to consider not just how psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts are represented in cinema but also how the recourse to film functions in the analytic session, how the analysand’s speech and associations and memories may draw and depend on cinema’s given sounds and images, its provision of a residue of signifying traces taken up as unconscious material (we watch and grasp films consciously but what counts for us individually in the long run of the psyche may come with quite another urgency, be very different to whatever a film might urge in its images and their ordering, is something only analytically calculable). (26)