Entertainment psychology – A Jungian perspective on the feminine in film
A new look at the Wizard of Oz
John Beebe, MD is a Jungian analyst, and co-author, with Virginia Apperson, of the new book, The Presence of the Feminine in Film. In a Shrink Rap Radio podcast interview, he talks about how movies bring to life female characters and the feminine aspect of our psyches, whether we are male or female.
“Somehow in The Wizard of Oz, the pretensions of patriarchy are exposed,” he says, “it allows the feminine in the form of that little girl to come forward and the good to assert the power of the feminine.
“And I think the whole drama turns on an intuition that American culture was getting inflated in a masculine direction and going much too much into power and development, and it needed to keep itself balanced and remember feminine values.”
Active vs passive imagination
Dr. Beebe comments, “Film works by having the consciousness of someone interact with the unconscious presentations of the characters so that something very odd happens – a kind of dialogue takes place between conscious and unconscious.
“And that’s what Jung means by active imagination as opposed to passive imagination. Now, to be fair, half the films that are released are simply passive imagination, of wishful fantasies – what it might be like to go on a date, or get married, or have an adventure. …
“But when you introduce that element of a consciousness, dialoguing and the meaning of the story keeps changing as the consciousness engages with it, then I think you have active imagination and you have this auteur cinema, and you have this cinema being used as a kind of psychological exploration.”
Continued in transcript article: A Jungian View of the Feminine in Film
Related :
Movies to explore our inner life
Michael Chabon: Entertainment has a bad name
Guillermo del Toro on the power of fairytales
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