How a psychologist thinks about your favorite
Film & TV characters.
Welcome to Characters On The Couch, my Film & Television site, where I delve into character psychology and character development. If you’re just plain interested in psychology and film or are a writer, actor, or director, I bring you my insights into your favorite contemporary and classic characters. By doing so, I hope to help you understand their deeper (and deepest) psychological motivations.
When you think about truly iconic films, what is it that gives them such staying power? Is it the time of your life when you watched it? Could it be that one or more characters aligned with your own deepest struggles or painful experiences? Is it the costumes or images that seemed unforgettable? Or maybe, it’s simply that it pulled at your heart and caused you to explore emotions in a new and profound way?
I say it’s all of it. And, equally, when these meaningful elements are missing, a story becomes, well, forgettable. This is what I hope this site will encourage you to do. To transform your story, personal or in writing, into magic by finding the human thread that links it and you to a universal experience.
Everything in life ties back to complex emotions as well as the rhythm and language of feelings and psychology. On my blog and in what I’ve written in Psychology & Story, are thoughts I hope will help.
For more than 40 years as a psychoanalyst, I have listened to my patients tell their stories and I find words that speak to what is going on deep inside them. The heart of good character development, too, is in the character’s psychology. Using movies and their characters, I’ll talk about a character’s deepest motivations, agonies, and breakthroughs to apply to your movie-watching, writing, or yourself.
CODA
You’re Entitled to Your Own Life
(Even If Someone Needs You)
CODA, written and directed by Sian Heder, is a beautiful, heartwarming coming-of-age film with a happy ending. Not all difficult stories about trying to have your own life in the face of someone who needs you (read: your parents) end with so much understanding, acceptance, and support. It’s hard to break away and be yourself…
PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN
Trauma Driven Obsession
It’s Not Healing
Emerald Fennell’s brilliantly disturbing and evocative film, Promising Young Woman, shows us one troubling aftermath of trauma. And, it’s all because no one helped. Cassie lost her very best friend (and only true soulmate) to suicide. Why? Because Nina couldn’t go on after a violent and repeated gang rape that seriously traumatized her. And, no…
SOUND OF METAL
How Silence Stops A Man From Running
Ruben has been on the run for a long time. No one becomes a heroin addict unless there’s something too painful inside for him to stop, for even a moment, to hear (or feel). So, Ruben runs – with drugs, frantic hard metal drumming, and in his desperate love for his singer-girlfriend, Lou (Olivia Cooke).…