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.
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…
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]…
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,…