• Skip to main content
  • Skip to header right navigation
  • Skip to site footer
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Mail

Characters On The Couch

How a psychologist thinks about your favorite Film & TV characters.

  • Home
  • Blog
  • About Sandra E. Cohen, PhD
  • Entertainment Consulting
  • Psychology & Story
  • Leo Hurwitz’s Documentaries
  • Contact
Cabaret How Quickly Freedom Disappears

CABARET
How Quickly Freedom Disappears

September 13, 2018 by Dr. Sandra E. Cohen

It’s frightening how quickly freedom disappears. We have to watch out for those complicated forces, in the outside world and living inside us, that want to deceive us if we aren’t aware. Cabaret is a powerful and disturbing illustration, plus a startling reminder, of the various ways these dangers lurk. Over Labor Day weekend, I …

Read moreCABARET
How Quickly Freedom Disappears
Crazy Rich Asians How to Be The Winner Over A Boyfriend's Mother's Envy?

CRAZY RICH ASIANS
How To Be The Winner
Over A Boyfriend’s Mother’s Envy

September 3, 2018 by Dr. Sandra E. Cohen

Jon Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians is about crazy wealth. But it’s really about so much more. It’s about the clashes between old money and new; privilege and disadvantage; American-born Asians and those calling Asia home; between following passion and giving into duty. Mostly it’s about a boyfriend’s mother’s envy. And, at the film’s center, we …

Read moreCRAZY RICH ASIANS
How To Be The Winner
Over A Boyfriend’s Mother’s Envy
The Wife Why Some Women Sell Their Souls Loving A Narcisist

THE WIFE
Why Do Some Women
Sell Their Souls Loving A Narcissist?

August 26, 2018 by Dr. Sandra E. Cohen

*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 …

Read moreTHE WIFE
Why Do Some Women
Sell Their Souls Loving A Narcissist?
blacKkKlansman-hate-self-hate-characters-on-the-couch

BLACKkKLANSMAN
Standing Up To Hate & Self-Hate
1970 Is Now

August 16, 2018 by Dr. Sandra E. Cohen

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 …

Read moreBLACKkKLANSMAN
Standing Up To Hate & Self-Hate
1970 Is Now
eighth grade sucks and a difficult history doesn't help

EIGHTH GRADE
6 Reasons Why Middle School Sucks
(& A Difficult History Doesn’t Help)

August 2, 2018 by Dr. Sandra E. Cohen

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 …

Read moreEIGHTH GRADE
6 Reasons Why Middle School Sucks
(& A Difficult History Doesn’t Help)
three identical strangers, effects of separation trauma

THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS
The Signs of Separation Trauma?
This Film Tells Us A Lot

July 26, 2018 by Dr. Sandra E. Cohen

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 …

Read moreTHREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS
The Signs of Separation Trauma?
This Film Tells Us A Lot
  • ← Previous
  • Go to page 1
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 9
  • Go to page 10
  • Go to page 11
  • Go to page 12
  • Go to page 13
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 30
  • Next →

Inspiration

“We come to Film and TV to find our hidden stories. If we look deeply into a character’s psyche, there is much to see about ourselves.”

Recent Posts

The Power of the Dog Why Phil Burbank’s Cruelty is About What He Hates in Himself
SOUND OF METAL How Silence Stops A Man From Running
The Father Dementia and The Fight To Hold Onto Who He Was

Copyright © 2023 · Sandra E. Cohen, Ph.D. · All Rights Reserved