HGPSAS Film

Film Series

Psychoanalysis and Films

Thursdays in August
7:00 p.m. The Jung Center
5200 Montrose Boulevard
This series is free.

Mark your calendars on Thursdays when psychoanalysts and psychologists will present films of particular interest to anyone with a psychological bent. The series examines films through the lens of psychoanalysis, with speakers from the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Society and the Jung Center.

August 6, 2009
The King of Comedy (1983)
A pitch black comedy about our contemporary obsession with celebrity, directed by Martin Scorsese. Foiled in his attempts to take his amateur comedy act from his mother's basement directly to late-night television, Rupert Pupkin (Robert DeNiro) hatches a plan to kidnap the show's Johnny Carson-like host, Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis) and seize his deserved share of the limelight.

Ronald Schenk, PhD, is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Dallas and Houston. A longtime Senior Training Analyst and recent president of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, he has written three books, including The Sunken Quest, The Wasted Fisher, The Pregnant Fish: Post-modern Reflections of Depth Psychology.

August 13, 2009
Celestial Clockwork (1996)
Venezuelan director Fina Torres presents a confection of a Cinderella story in a riotous carnival of music, colors, witchery, sexuality and magic. Fleeing her wedding in Caracas, Ana (Adriana Gil) flies in her wedding dress to Paris, with dreams of becoming an opera star. Thwarted in her quest, Ana seeks her own version of the glass slipper in this quirky musical valentine to art, love, friendship, and fate.

Catherine Stevenson, MD, is a psychiatrist and Freudian psychoanalyst in private practice in Houston. She is on the clinical faculty of Baylor College of Medicine. Prior to medical school, the focus of her studies on the interplay between art and theology. Her papers on the arts and analysis include, "The Stendhal Syndrome, Art and the Analytic Third".

August 20, 2009
Mystic River (2003)
Fate and choice are brilliantly portrayed in this award winning film that opens as a pedophile interrupts three boys at play in the street, taking one of them away. We encounter them again twenty-five years later, and how the three struggle with their past as it impacts their present reveals the ways they are both trapped by history and able to engage the possibility of freedom.

Gretchen Heyer, MA, MDiv, LPC, Jungian analyst, is completing her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in various literary and academic journals. She has presented on Jungian themes to both national and international audiences and practices here in Houston.

August 27, 2009
Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
A funny, touching and insightful movie about a lonely, quirky man. He finds a "companion" on the internet, an anatomically correct doll which he regards and presents to the world as a real woman. His family, the local doctor, and the townspeople go along with his illusion/delusion, allowing him to heal from prior traumas in his life.

Margaret Jordan, PhD, is a psychologist in private practice and an assistant clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Baylor College of Medicine. She teaches psychoanalytic theory and technique to mental health professionals and trainees, and she is currently President-Elect of the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Society.