The erotic in film and in mass psychology
Kernberg, O.F.
Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 58(1): 88-108
1994
ISSN/ISBN: 0025-9284 PMID: 8167614 Document Number: 432733
The medium of film offers a vivid demonstration of the ongoing tension between conventional morality and mature, passionate love. While film activates mass psychology and therefore conventionality, the erotic in film threatens conventional boundaries. The dialectic thus involved in erotic art in film, the conventional film, and pornography sheds light on the unconscious motivations for accepting or rejecting the erotic. The author highlights relevant psychoanalytic theories to help formulate the nature of the erotic in film as well as the structures of the erotic film, the conventional film, and pornography. After discussing several examples, he concludes that both the conventional film and pornography are unconscious allies in opposing mature, passionate love.