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Film and Psychoanalysis
I Send You This Place Andrea Sisson was a 2013 Filmmaker 25 New Face, but I only met her in person this past spring, at the Museum of the Moving Image’s premiere of When the Phone Rang, by another New Face from that year, Iva Radivojević. Andrea, whose films include I Send You This Place and Everything Beautiful Is Far Away, came up to say hello and mentioned that she had been studying psychoanalysis and is now a therapist as well as a filmmaker. I was immediately intrigued—in the past couple of years I’ve done some remedial psychoanalytic studies, finally reading Freud and Lacan and studying topics like the death drive. Our conversation led to me asking Andrea—who holds an MFA from Bard College and an MSW from Hunter College and is professor of film at FIT SUNY in the film, media and performing arts department—to explore the parallels between filmmaking and psychoanalysis. That request led to another conversation, one with colleague Kendra Terry, which she recounts here. — Scott Macaulay
The plan was to meet in the park after work, but as the evening cold encroached, we abandoned the park and ducked into a quiet Tex-Mex restaurant. We secured a table in the back sunroom, and I set up my phone to record. Outside, the lights of the historical BAM theater flickered on.
“When we first met,” I began, “you said film is very psychological.”
Kendra Terry nodded. “I have a lot of thoughts on this. Film theory often focuses on psychoanalyzing characters in a film. But I’m more interested in a formal similarity.”
Kendra is a doctoral-level psychoanalytic psychotherapist introduced by a mutual collaborator. Our first meeting was electric—shooting ideas about film, art, performance and their parallels with psychoanalysis. Our sensibilities align in more ways than one, giving rise to several collaborative projects, including a psychoanalytic studio visit series we plan to launch in spring 2026. Our conversations always brim with creative expanse, and I leave with at least three new projects under my belt—too many to actually produce, but ripe ideas.
“I’m very interested in the mind,” Kendra continued. “I’m also interested in film as a medium and how it can be used to exemplify the inner workings of human consciousness—even if it’s a montage that half-badly, half-brilliantly imitates unconscious logic.”
I am a filmmaker and, newly, a therapist. In both practices, my work circles the same thing: the unconscious. I’m drawn to the formal kinship my two practices share. What happens when filmmaking and psychoanalysis are treated as mirrored forms of inquiry? Can both processes be understood as attempts to access and organize the unconscious—each working in the field of meaning-making?
“I’m in no position to criticize,” Kendra added. “Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze was really important. But the theory is a study of the object of the film—the characters on screen and their relationship to the viewer. My personal interest is in the form—how cinematography, editing, sound and structure convey what an experience feels like.”
“Like structural film theory,” I offered. “Films that focus on structure over content.”
Kendra nodded. “I think about how the camera becomes a sort of amputated eye, a visual apparatus, a rat whose brain we can slice. It’s a way to look simultaneously at the world and at the consciousness through which we perceive the world.”
When I work on a piece, I often see myself as a scientist trying to observe what my cognition and consciousness are doing. I imagine myself in a lab coat, holding my Sony Handycam, asking: How is this brain working? How is memory working here? With the camera, I attempt to document and record these inner workings. In the edit, I let image and thought braid themselves into sense. My scientist-self asks, Can a film communicate something true about our inner emotional and cognitive experiences?
“Through a new psychoanalytic lens,” I told Kendra, “I’ve started to understand my own filmmaking process as free associative.”
“A visual free association,” Kendra reframed.
The analyst asks the patient to freely associate—to say whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial, illogical or embarrassing, without filtering or judging. The goal is to let language drift toward the unconscious.
Years ago, when making my first feature documentary, I Send You This Place (2012), I insisted on a specific workflow: associating linearly through visuals and thoughts with little judgment, letting one image or action cue the next throughout our nearly year-long shoot—including my own performance. I felt this approach reflected something close to how experience was lived and felt, and I wanted to make that visible.
For a 2021 video installation, Memory Map, I built on this process. I spent a week in my childhood home filming anything that gave me what I called the chill of memory—fabric textures, handprints on doorknobs. I began without a destination, filming associatively—no matter how trivial or illogical. In the edit, I paid close attention to thoughts and images that arose as I reviewed the footage, then layered these stray thoughts and memories as subtitles, overlays and superimposed images. At the time, the process was instinctual; the connection to free association came only later.
One audience member told me the film illustrated screen memory—Sigmund Freud’s term for a memory that displaces a more disturbing or traumatic one. A screen memory forms a protective overlay for the ego. Another viewer felt the film eerily mirrored their own experience of intrusive thoughts. Others have said my work carries a sense of mystery, as though the film itself is trying to unlock or reveal something.
“Is it silly to make a comparison here?” Kendra asked. “Is editing like dreaming? All day we collect material. Then, at night, when we dream, we reorganize that material. The next morning, we wake with a new understanding. You do the same—you gather images, and in the edit decide what makes sense. Then, you produce a new understanding in the form of a film. Is editing analogous to dreaming?”
We edit to reorganize in the same way we dream to reorganize. In psychoanalysis, dreams are a direct link to latent unconscious material.
Kendra went on: “Freud talks about dreams as wish fulfillment. Our dreams are safe places to play out our repressed desires. In film theory, Slavoj Žižek draws on Jacques Lacan’s ideas to frame cinema as a space where desire is staged.”
“Žižek talks about Hitchcock and Lynch constructing cinematic fantasies,” I added, “externalizing unconscious desires and logics on screen in ways that reveal the structure of desire itself.” Freud himself compared artistic creation to dreaming. In this sense, filmmaking becomes a form of sublimation—transforming the filmmaker’s repressed desires into something symbolic and socially acceptable.
I offer another angle: contemporary psychoanalyst James L. Fosshage extends Freud’s theory by proposing that dreams aren’t merely symbolic disguises of repressed material and wishes, but an active process of meaning-making.
Dreaming, Fosshage suggests, is how the psyche organizes, integrates and transforms experience. It strikes me that the process of picking up a script or a camera can serve a similar function. Carl Jung saw the creative act as a direct engagement with the unconscious, a process explored through active imagination. Lacan, too, understood creative expression as working through imaginary and symbolic registers to evoke what cannot be spoken. For Lacan, art is a form through which the unconscious speaks; that is, art gives shape to the unconscious not by expressing it directly, but by staging the gap between the Symbolic and the Real—the place where something cannot be spoken yet is nonetheless felt.
Kendra added, “I’ve always wondered if there’s more room to think about the process of creating a film as meaning making, as you put it, or, as I sometimes say, a sense-making machine. In analysis, part of our role is to help the patient transform what Wilfred Bion calls beta elements (raw information and sense perceptions) into the alpha function (conscious, narrative thought). How is that not the same process as writing, shooting, acting and editing? Both are acts of making sense out of the barrage of information, images and sounds we’re steeped in throughout the day’s residue. It’s a kind of dreaming—reorganizing nonsense into narrative form.”
“Sometimes when I work, I feel like I’m dreaming,” I told Kendra, “I’ve even finished films in my dreams.”
“Making in a waking dream state.” Kendra laughed. “That’s psychoanalysis.”
Kendra double majored in neuroscience and film in undergrad. During that time, she was drawn to Thomas Nagel’s argument that one can never fully communicate their subjective experience to another because no one else can ever feel exactly the same. Kendra told me, “There’s an explanatory gap. I kept feeling that rational, scientific language fails to communicate irrational experience. But with film, you feel something. It’s the same with art and literature. These vehicles of image, sound and rhythm can do something language cannot. I wondered if film could do it better.”
“Ah, the familiar desire to use film…” I started.
“The desire to use film to communicate what it’s like to have a subjective experience,” Kendra finished.
“You studied neuroscience and felt that language fell short, and now you’re a psychoanalyst who works in language all day,” I pointed out.
“That’s such an interesting observation,” Kendra laughed. “In a way, psychoanalysis is outside of language. There’s latent (unconscious) and manifest (conscious) content. I often think of the patient as a text, and you’re always looking for subtext.” She held up two fingers turned sideways: “The top index finger is the manifest content—what’s spoken aloud. The bottom middle finger is the latent content—the unconscious, what’s not being said. You read both simultaneously, while also listening for subtext.”
“You read between the lines,” I added. I think about what psychoanalysis does outside of language, and what visual work does there, too.
Kendra continued, “As an analyst, you’re always listening to what’s spoken and what’s not spoken—what’s intentionally avoided, what’s unconsciously blocked or repressed and what someone wants to say but can’t. Language does as good a job as it can, but 60 percent of what you take in is subtext. I also pay attention to prosody—rhythm, pauses, the way someone cuts themselves off after saying something important. It’s like reading a musical score.”
I think about prosody in relation to directing and editing actors—listening for the breath between lines, the stumble that reveals something unexpected in the delivery of a scripted scene.
There’s a poetry in Kendra’s description of analytic listening. There is something rare and beautiful in the way the analyst looks and in how a patient is seen. The analyst attends to both what is illuminated and what remains in shadow. I’m reminded that many artists relate to their work as a way of being seen by others that everyday life and language rarely allow. In both practices, we’re attuned to what sits beneath the visible surface.
“The post-Bionian and relational theorists talk about field theory and the analytic third,” Kendra said. “In the shared field (a co-created psychological and emotional atmosphere), a third field emerges between analyst and patient. We’re co-inhabiting this intersubjective field, and that’s what allows us to experience aspects of the other’s subjectivity.” She paused. “It’s like late-night wine with a friend—you don’t have the answers, but you explore, and together you arrive somewhere new.”
When I meet with a new patient, I often tell them something similar: we’ll work collaboratively. It’s almost as though they lead the project, and I join as a dramaturg, a witness, a producer.
“It’s collective dreaming,” said Kendra. “The analyst free associates as much as the analysand because they’re in the same field.”
Do collaborators—co-directors, co-writers, creative partners—also inhabit a similar shared subjectivity? Thomas Ogden proposes that meaning is co-created through a process marked by spontaneity, uncertainty and mutual transformation—a process that sounds akin to artistic improvisation. Some artists call this a mindmeld. I chuckle at the thought of an analyst and patient in a creative mindmeld.
I wonder whether films themselves might function as shared fields, offered to an audience. Sometimes, when I work, I think of the audience as a main character. I’m aware of the viewer and leave space for their cognition, projections and interpretations. Kendra indulged, “Right. But it’s one-directional. Unless it’s some interactive installation.”
“Yeah,” I laughed. “I’m not going there.”
The restaurant grows louder as dinner hour approaches, cutting into our focus. A child climbs over a chair beside us. I know my recorder won’t pick up clear sound. We start gathering the last scraps of our conversation.
I keep thinking about the lens. When I use the heavy zoom on my Sony Handycam—30 percent in camera, 30 percent digital—I try to get as close as I can to my subject—to the fabric. But really, I’m trying to get closer to some memory, some inner mystery, to what sits beneath the visible surface. And each time, the image begins to fuzz and explode into abstraction. It’s a process I undergo again and again: wanting to investigate something in my life. Yet, inside the mechanisms of my Handycam, the nearer I press, the more the subject dissolves into grain and pixelation. Closeness becomes opacity. This becomes a meditation.
“That’s psychoanalysis, too,” Kendra chimed. “You follow an association as far as it will let you.”
We laughed—back in the circular analogy we’ve been tracing all night.
Kendra offered, “Film theorists always bring up Plato’s Cave—are we just a bunch of people looking at our shadows? Yeah, maybe we are. But film reflects us back to ourselves. It gives us meta-awareness. And we can learn from that—we can learn about what we’re doing. Film has the power to exemplify things about human behavior the way psychoanalysis does—just in a different form.”
I let this echo as it settled: Film has the power to exemplify things about human behavior the way psychoanalysis does—just in a different form.
In that echo, I am reminded that for many filmmakers I know, creative expression is integral, working in tandem with the inner psychic processes essential to integrating our experiences and making meaning of life.
For nearly 15 years, I practiced as an experimental filmmaker and artist—a Master of Fine Arts and Fulbright scholar—often touching psychological themes in my work before deciding to pursue a second master’s degree to directly study the psyche and the practice of therapy. Last year, an artist colleague asked about my “career change.” A mentor jumped in: It’s not a change—it’s a continuation.
It strikes me that I’ve perhaps enlisted Kendra in this conversation to help me explore the terrain of this continuum—not to make a formal argument or position ourselves as experts in psychoanalytic film theory but to inhabit the interdisciplinary space of practice, to think between the folds of these dual processes and explore what they mean to us.
By the end of our conversation, something clarified. We began by tracing the parallels between two forms: what cinema can do that mirrors psychic life. What crystallized is a new assurance of how deeply my unfolding psychoanalytic practice connects with my long-standing creative one. I realize that whatever I make—whether a film or a therapeutic alliance—arises from the same impulse. In both film and psychoanalysis, I reach toward the fuzzed, pixelated edge of experience, hovering just beyond articulation yet as essential as what comes into focus.
The child beside us is now perched on the back of his chair, watching us with quiet curiosity. We pack up and head out.
As we walk to the train, I feel like a puddle—have we entered our shared field, our third space? We banter about caseloads and energy levels—talking now, in the fall of night, about the practicalities of the profession. Leaving theory behind, Kendra wonders where she should open her office next year when she finishes her postdoc. I say goodbye as she rushes toward the A train.
