Posts by Dr. Sandra E. Cohen
THE WIFE
Why Do Some Women
Sell Their Souls Loving A Narcissist?
*Spoiler Alert: Don’t Read Until You’ve Seen This Film* The Wife slowly and disturbingly reveals many things about Joan Castleman (Glenn Close) and her marriage to 1992 Nobel Prize Winner, Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce). She’s lived a lie, loving a narcissist. Allowed it. She’s become merely “the wife.” But, when Joe asks her, as she…
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BLACKkKLANSMAN
Standing Up To Hate & Self-Hate
1970 Is Now
Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman is a brilliant, terrifying, and timely treatise on hate. The film tells Ron Stallworth’s true early 1970’s story (played by John David Washington): a courageous, harrowing, but ultimately foiled effort to expose the KKK and its virulent racial hate. Fuel it’s fires and hate justifies violence. Then is now: 1970 is 2018. Hate…
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EIGHTH GRADE
6 Reasons Why Middle School Sucks
(& A Difficult History Doesn’t Help)
Middle School definitely sucks for many kids. It sucked for Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher) in her excruciatingly awkward (but at the same time sweet and hopeful) journey from Middle School to High School in Bo Burnham’s film Eighth Grade. Maybe it sucked for you. We see the obvious reasons in vivid Technicolor: the insecurities, the…
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THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS
The Signs of Separation Trauma?
This Film Tells Us A Lot
Tim Wardle’s documentary, Three Identical Strangers, is a timely and disturbing account of the trauma of early separation. As a psychoanalyst who specializes in separation trauma, I left the theater shaken and troubled. Children aren’t for using. They aren’t for self-serving studies, proving points, or punishing parents (yes, Trump and your cronies, that’s you.) The…
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CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
I Will Find Myself In You
Will I Feel Everything?
Desire is what director, Luca Guadagnino, hoped to convey in Call Me By Your Name – the kind of desire that allows you to live life by following your feelings with openness. Guadagnino calls this: “living with a sense of joie de vivre”, in which, he says: “we should always be very earnest with [our]…
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PHANTOM THREAD
What’s It Really About? Reynolds & Alma’s Perverse Feeding Game?
Paul Thomas Anderson has done it again. He’s a master at exploring the various kinds of perverse power games involved in problems with dependency and love. Anderson’s new film, Phantom Thread, is another brilliant character study to add to Boogie Nights, Magnolia, The Master, and Inherent Vice (to name a notable few). In Phantom Thread,…
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