Embodied Encounters: New Approaches to Psychoanalysis and Cinema

What is the role of the unconscious in our visceral approaches to cinema?

Embodied Encounters offers a unique collection of essays written by leading thinkers and writers in film studies, with a guiding principle that embodied and material existence can, and perhaps ought to, also allow for the unconscious. The contributors embrace work which has brought ‘the body’ back into film theory and question why psychoanalysis has been excluded from more recent interrogations.

The chapters included here engage with Jung and Freud, Lacan and Bion, and Klein and Winnicott in their interrogations of contemporary cinema and the moving image. In three parts the book presents examinations of both classic and contemporary films including Black Swan, Zero Dark Thirty and The Dybbuk:

Part 1 – The Desire, the Body and the Unconscious

Part 2 – Psychoanalytical Theories and the Cinema

Part 3 – Reflections and Destructions, Mirrors and Transgressions

Embodied Encounters is an eclectic volume which presents in one book the voices of those who work with different psychoanalytical paradigms. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, scholars and students of film and culture studies and film makers.

Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska is an internationally recognized award-winning theorist and film maker, best known for her documentary Married to the Eiffel Tower. She is a Reader in Film Theory and Practice at the University of Bedfordshire, UK and is the author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film (Routledge, 2014). She was awarded her PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London under the supervision of Stephen Frosh and Laura Mulvey.