When it comes to analytic psychotherapy, film typically falls into one of four categories -- entertainment, educational, documentary or art/experimental film. There are films about people seeing or being therapists (or convey the psychic states of various characters), or there are films that illustrate or explain a therapeutic idea or theory, or there are films that document historical events, or there are films that convey the experience of something for the viewer. These films, however, don’t fit neatly into any of those categories.

One idea behind the Presenting Problems project is to try to find new representational means for understanding the experience in analytic therapy especially when it comes to unconscious processes. If we think about the case study, traditionally, it is describes the words spoken by the patient and therapist, sometimes a physical description or non-verbal expression or communication or perhaps it will include the inner thoughts of the therapist. But even with the most detailed and insightful notes of a session, the typical case presentation doesn’t always convey the psychoanalytic situation or the kinds of things that happen, shift, change or appear unexpectedly. The case study is one important but limited way of describing what takes place in the clinical hour or in treatment in general. These films offer another.

Without sometimes ever mentioning therapy or therapeutic encounter, these films portray aspects of the encounter either between two people or between parts of the self by using a variety of media (live action, hand-drawn animation, miniatures, comic books, playing cards, board games, archival material from magazines and movie stills). The movies are intended to be used for a group discussion and because of the dialectic nature of image and sound, film can be a collective experience of dreaming together. In that experience, the audience has a chance to find a world that is and is not their own; they can come in and out of conscious awareness of what they see, know, think, remember and feel (even if that audience in some cases is only one person).