Film, Television and the Psychology of the Social Dream

by Robert W. W. Rieber

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Author: Robert W. W. Rieber

Publisher: Springer

Hardcover:
ISBN 10: 1461471745
ISBN 13: 978-1461471745

This book demonstrates how social distress or anxiety is reflected, modified, and evolves through the medium of the motion picture. Tracing cinema from its earliest forms, the authors show how film is a perfect medium for generating and projecting dreams, fantasies, and nightmares, on the individual as well as the societal level. Arising at the same time as Freud’s influential ideas, cinema has been intertwined with the wishes and fears of the greater culture and has served as a means of experiencing those feelings in a communal and taming environment. From Munsterberg’s original pronouncements in the early 20th century about the psychology of cinema, through the pioneering films of Melies, the works of the German expressionists, to James Bond and today’s superheroes this book weaves a narrative highlighting the importance of the social dream. It develops the idea that no art form goes beyond the ordinary process of consciousness in the same way as film, reflecting, as it does, the cognitive, emotional, and volitional aspects of human nature.

Review

From the reviews:

"...any treatise on film or television themes is necessarily psychological. This is true of the book Film, Television and the Psychology of the Social Dream by Robert W. Rieber and Robert J. Kelly, and its title appears to emphasize the social psychology of film and television as shared experiences."
Lauren S. Seifert
PsycCRITIQUES
September 8, 2014, Vol. 59, No. 36, Article 6

From the Back Cover

From the flickering images of the earliest silent films to today's billion-dollar blockbusters, films have captivated the public's eyes, hearts, and psyches. Reflecting – and often creating – the tenor of their times, they combine layers of symbolic and metaphorical images to make a stronger internal impact on their viewers than the still image or the printed word.

The compelling pages of Film, Television and the Psychology of the Social Dream illuminate the profound emotional processes involved as films inform and transform our unconscious and conscious minds. Drawing on original and classic scholarship in its field, this provocative volume analyzes these interactions through a wide array of influential films, including pioneering German expressionist works, the Star Trek cycle, and The Godfather. Movies' transformative role in molding philosophies and ethics is shown as the larger meanings of public heroes, stars, fears, and desires evolve, and as salient genres embody more than simply a good story. But despite this century of evolution, the authors assert, one thing remains constant: the critical place of film in communicating individual dreams as well as the shared dreams of a society. Among the featured topics:

The cult of celebrity: how Hollywood created reality.
Mental illness and "the shrink" in film.
Science fiction: aliens out there, aliens in us.
Organized crime and the mass media.
Bourne, Bond, and beyond: the significance of the spy.
Archetypes: inventors, detectives, warriors.

Film, Television and the Psychology of the Social Dream will interest social and clinical psychologists as a noteworthy testament to the human imagination in transmitting and processing culture.

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Film, Television and the Psychology of the Social Dream