to "CinemaShrink" where movies meet myth and become much more than they thought they were. And you can find a new path to understanding yourself and current realities.
What is myth, you might ask. When you walk out of a film, shaking your head and recognizing that "yes, I know the truth of that story", you've found myth in film. You've seen beyond the present, beneath the past and can, if you wish, free yourself into a larger sense of possibility.
Myth, to my way of thinking, is not Greek but a state of mind that lifts, directs and insists that you to become all that you can be.
I'm Jane Alexander Stewart, a psychologist living and working in Los Angeles. I've been in private practice for more than twenty years and have created CinemaShrink to present my insights about film as a carrier of mythic themes that can assist you in your personal quest for understanding and inspiration. When you discover the underlying mythic theme in a film, you find a deeply meaningful insight or context for your life. With my essays and my references on this site, I hope to encourage you to look for more than entertainment when you see a movie. Start looking for reflections of the most important issues in life.
People may quite naturally come into therapy looking for solutions to problems but, truthfully, everyone wants more than short-term answers. Problems, in an odd sort of way, offer an opportunity to seek a more satisfying, more fulfilling way to live life. I often suggest that people see a film to more fully understand a personal problem. Problems may grab our attention but, more importantly, they insist that we open up and stretch to meet them. I believe psychotherapy has become an art of the heart, a way for us to create the most loving and beloved self we can imagine. And looking at movies from a mythic perspective helps stimulate the imagination and further the quest.
As a psychologist, I believe that active imagination holds the key to healing the past and meeting challenges in the present. Films, like dreams, are full of fertile images emerging from the unconscious. In fact a film can easily be likened to a collective dream, stirred up to the surface within a dynamic interaction of many collaborative, not fully definable forces. As with a dream, the people working on a film often lack a clear sense of what is being produced until it's done. And then - again like a dream - a film gets re-worked by every one who interprets it. Some films like Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, Star Wars or Silence of the Lambs touch a cultural nerve but many may simply speak to you.
Films mixing mythic themes into contemporary stories are especially helpful when you feel lost, suffering from confusion or recovering from disillusionment. Finding a mythic metaphor in a film can clue you into a direction hidden from view. Suddenly, you see what lies ahead and what you must accept or change to get where you're going.
I'd like to tell you my story about finding a revised mythic figure in film that woke me up and gave me a fresh perspective on life after forty.
I've come of age in a time when the role and value of women in society has changed dramatically. Many times, I've wandered in a psychological desert looking for yet another way to re-invent myself. I could not follow role models of women who had come before me because they had faced very different challenges. During my lifetime, it has become important not only for women to break loose from old stereotypes and become productive but to take a stronger stand in society. There are no precedents for this. There are no myths.
It's no longer a secret that myths for women have been colored and limited by patriarchal frameworks. The myths about taking one's place in society have been for men. The hero, a celebrated and well-known symbol of public achievement is male by definition. (As an aside, men are facing much the same challenge from the other side of the coin. They lack ancient myths celebrating masculine prowess in the private realm.) I had mourned this absence of a feminine hero during most of my early years but quietly kept looking for a feminine archetype that rang true as compelling as "hero" for women. I imagined one that embodied feminine traits, one who projected the usual vision of super heroism - magical, but also ordinary and relevant like the masculine images of Parcival seeking the holy grail or Luke Skywalker guided by the force, a hero possibly critical to the survival of the planet.
Like many people, I had long enjoyed film as a high form of entertainment where I could identify with the characters and their stories. I identified and dis-identified, having great conversations with friends about the feelings and ideas that a film stirred up.
Then I saw The Silence of the Lambs and found that larger-than-life, believable role model I'd been looking for. Clarice Starling is equivalent to any hero. She saves the girl, apprehends the criminal and goes up against evil incarnate to preserve humanity. And she does it by paying attention to her feelings, acting on her intuition and relating on a heart to heart level with the enemy - she doesn't forget the evil monster is a human being. She comes as a new type of hero, a feminine hero born full bloom from a collaboration of many creative people from many creative walks of life, including her viewers. Clarice filled the bill for me as an archetype of feminine strength and vision.
And Clarice Starling gave me a fresh perspective on myself as a woman nearing the end of a century of amazing change. My interpretation of "The New Feminine Hero in The Silence of the Lambs" is here on the website for you to read. I feel like I found a gem. Clarice helped me value feminine qualities as essential and significant to peace of mind, regardless of their assigned status in patriarchal society. I finally felt connected in a society that has a long tradition of setting women to the side, as if incidental to its survival.
It's natural to find mirrors of ourselves in movies, feel larger than life for a few hours and identify with possibilities of making our lives more satisfying. And, I believe, psychotherapy is a little like making a private movie, delving into the depths of our psyches and creating a story in which we are the star. I was looking for where my story after forty was going when I found Clarice. In Clarice Starling's story, I found a metaphor to help me figure out what came after school, marriage, children, friends and career. She suggested a different, energetic end game for a "hero's" journey as it is lived by a woman. I believe it's time to take watching film more seriously, be thoughtful about the images coming through and use them productively as if interpreting a dream, reading a classic or listening to poetry.
