Bulletin

Issue: June 2006

Books

Jung and the wide screen

The creative and spiritual insights of the ideas that Carl Jung left us through analytical psychology are 'punchy, contemporary and attractive to "Gen Yers"' - those born after 1977.

Jung concentrated on the crosscultural and timeless language of images as they filtered through art, myth, religion, dreams, and unconscious projections. According to La Trobe University lecturer in Media Studies, Dr Terrie Waddell, this way of seeing is particularly useful when it comes to analysing cinema and television stories.

She covers this subject in her latest book, Mis/takes: Archetype, Myth and Identity in Screen Culture published in the UK by Routledge, launched this month at the International Association of Jungian Studies Conference at the University of Greenwich, UK.

Dr Waddell research includes popular culture, myth, carnival, the grotesque, and analytical psychology, all of which find a place in Mis/takes.

She says examining the function of psychological motifs and symbols in film and television opens up another way of thinking about how identity can be constructed.

Mulholland Drive, Memento, The Others, The X-Files, Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, Spider, Intimacy and Absolutely Fabulous, are among the gems of the small and wide screen that she examines in detail.

Mis/takes, she says, gives readers a chance to engage with screen material in an 'original and subversive way'. The book will be of great interest to students of film, cultural studies, media, gender studies and analytical psychology.