Psychoanalysis and Cinema

Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows examines the long and uneven history of developments in modern art, science and technology that brought psychoanalysis and the cinema together towards the end of the nineteenth century. Vicky Lebeau explores the subsequent encounters between the two: the seductions of psychoanalysis and cinema as converting, though distinct, ways of talking about dream and desire, image and illusion, shock and sexuality. Beginning with Freud´s encounter with the spectacle of hysteria on display in fin-de-siècle Paris, this study offers a detailed reading of the texts and concepts which generated the field of psychoanalytic film theory.