Dr. Frank Scherer (Lecturer, Department of Equity Studies, York) will be giving a lecture on the influence of psychoanalysis on filmmaking to mark the155th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud on Thursday, March 31st from 1:00-2:00 pm in  room 764 York Research Tower (building #95 on the map found here).

The founding of psychoanalysis and the birth of the cinema are co-terminus. At the dawn of the twentieth century, when Sigmund Freud invented a new interpretative science called psychoanalysis, early silent film – both in Europe and in America – was associated with vulgarity and the morbose/pornography. If Freud was reluctant to let psychoanalysis be used and represented by Hollywood, the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis have nonetheless emerged through the new medium of film. Be it the psychology of the dream processes in Charlie Chaplin’s The Bankrobbers (1915), the talking cure and its treatment of the neuroses in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1941); or sexuality and its repression in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (1999) – the underlying concurrence of psychoanalysis and film is found in their reflection of the conflict between “the demand by the instinct and the prohibition of reality.

CCGES invited anyone interested to attend this talk, but asks that you please register in advance at: ccges@yorku.ca