The Dark Mirror Psychiatry and Film Noir

by Santos, Marlisa

• ISBN13: 9780739136652
• ISBN10: 0739136658
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-07-23
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

The Dark Mirror: Psychiatry and Film Noir probes the meanings behind the depiction of psychiatry and psychological illness in film noir, and how these depictions contribute to an overall understanding about the noir cycle itself. In this study, Marlisa Santos examines the role that the popularization of psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s, beginning with the use of psychoanalytic techniques to treat World War II soldiers, had on writers and filmmakers of noir. This popularization had a lasting effect on American culture, especially as ideas such as introspection and a morally neutral universe became status quo, and thereby became reflected in the noir series. The films analyzed in this study reveal a distillation of such ideas, a bringing to the surface concerns and fears regarding the contradictory, yet thrilling nature of psychoanalysis: the ability of a _science of the mind_ to eliminate the mysteries of the human psyche and the simultaneous nature of this science to expose the fundamental unknowability of the human psyche. Indeed, Santos argues that noir itself might not have existed without the introduction of psychoanalysis into American culture.

Author Biography

Marlisa Santos is associate professor and director of the Division of Humanities at Nova Southeastern University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Spellbound, Psychoanalysis, and Noir	p. xi
Noir Psychiatrists: The Good, the Bad, and the Bogus	p. 1
Noir Asylums and Treatments	p. 35
Noir Amnesia	p. 63
Noir Neuroses and Psychoses	p. 97
The "Gaslight" Phenomenon: Inducing Insanity in Noir	p. 139
Bibliography	p. 165
Index	p. 169
About the Author	p. 171
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.