How a Psychologist Helps You Understand Trauma Through Film & tV Characters
Welcome to Characters On The Couch, my Film & Television site, where I delve into character psychology. If you’re interested in psychology, film, or a combination of the two, I bring my insights into your favorite contemporary and classic characters. I hope to help you understand their deeper psychological motivations (and, maybe, even your own).
When you think about truly iconic films, do you wonder what gives them such staying power? Is it the time of your life when you watched them? Is it the costumes or images that seemed unforgettable? Did one or more characters align with your struggles or painful experiences? Did you feel along with them? Or maybe, it’s simply that the film pulled at your heart and caused you to explore emotions in a new and profound way?
I say it’s all of the above. And, in the same way, when these meaningful elements are missing, a story becomes forgettable. I hope this site will encourage you 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 us back to complex emotions and the rhythm and language of feelings and psychology. I'll offer your that language of feeling in my blog as I write about the human struggles in each film.
LEO HURWITZ
IN SEARCH OF HART CRANE 1966
Reflections On His Suicide
& His Childhood
Leo Hurwitz’s penetrating and poetic script and his camera (with the assistance of fellow cameraman Manfred Kirchheimer) (Watch Film), follow John Unterecker, Hart Crane’s biographer (the 800-page “Voyager: A Life Of Hart Crane”), through Unterecker’s researches into Hart Crane’s life. In Search of Hart Crane is composed primarily of fascinating interviews with friends of Hart…
THE SHAPE OF WATER
Seemingly Magic Cures
Cruelty and misunderstanding can make you a monster or a mute. Guillermo del Toro’s compelling allegorical fable, The Shape of Water, shows us that quite well. We can say all the obvious things about this multi-layered film set in its backdrop of the Cold War and a high-security government laboratory in 1962 Baltimore. There’s loneliness…
LEO HURWITZ 1966
THE SUN & RICHARD LIPPOLD
Unifier & Transformer
The Sun and Richard Lippold (Watch Film) begins with Leo Hurwitz, reminiscing. “In the studio of Richard Lippold, where being a musician as well as a sculptor, he played Bach and Pachelbel for me, where we talked for many hours, an idea came to me which is now this film.” This film, of course, is…
