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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.

4 Lessons In Love At Any Age
THE KAMINKSY METHOD

Are you having trouble making love work? Can’t seem to go with the flow in your relationships? Well, Chuck Lorre’s two-season Netflix series The Kominsky Method offers some lessons in love that just might help. These love lessons have two basic rules. So, here’s where you begin: 1. be totally present, and 2. pay close…

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LOVE ACTUALLY
Love’s Obstacles
How to Keep Hope Alive?

Richard Curtis’ 2003 film classic, Love Actually, is the ultimate Christmas ROM-COM. After all, the Christmas holiday-time is the season of love, romance, and family. But, what if you couldn’t be with family because of the pandemic? Or love isn’t working very well with the stresses of quarantine? Or maybe you’ve run into love’s inevitable…

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A FACE IN THE CROWD
6 Mistakes A Woman Makes
Falling for A “Bad Boy”

Lonesome Rhodes, a brashly-charming-drunken-drifter, is turned radio personality by Marcia Jeffries in Elia Kazan’s 1957 film, A Face in The Crowd. The film explores the climb to power of a rabble-rousing anti-social con man, as well as Lonesome’s ultimate tantruming downfall. Sound familiar? But perhaps the real question lies in why a woman like Marcia…

Read More about A FACE IN THE CROWD 6 Mistakes A Woman MakesFalling for A “Bad Boy”