Bringing Life to Psychology: Movies as Mirrors

By Nancy Dudley and Monica Baehr

Bringing Life to Psychology by Nancy Dudley and Monica Baehr

Movies as Mirrors: Is the purpose of movies simply to entertain and preoccupy our time with passive viewing? The authors of this book suggest that there is much more happening in our unconscious mind. As university instructors, they developed strategies for using films to broaden

• Language: English
• Publisher: SpringboardEdition
• Release date: Apr 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9783964960108

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The two of us, Nancy and Monica, have long histories of being drawn to movies and their interpretation as a significant part of our teaching in various aspects of psychology; we have also been travellers on our own paths on the human journey. Integral to this journey has also been our personal interest in interpreting movies as a path to self-understanding.  As such, we could be described as armchair film interpreters because we are among all who appreciate movies and ponder the messages conveyed by this multi-faceted media. As appreciators, we also draw from our own narratives of lived experience, our previous learning from books, schooling, travel, relationships, and/or educational studies focused on the life sciences.

In addition to lived experience, film interpretation draws heavily on the social sciences, especially by theorists who have engaged in research and writing in its various disciplines, particularly in all the arts, psychology, and history. So, with personal experiences, in combination with formal and informal learning, we each view movies with unique understandings drawn from the ways in which we have constructed our worldviews.

This book, then, draws on our diverse backgrounds involved with interpreting films to serve as an aid to others in their understanding of how psychological theories and frameworks can enable them to enrich the film viewing experience. In this way, we identify ourselves as filmists, a term coined by Mary Gregerson (2010) as those who take an approach in which the stimulus (movie) fades into the background, and their responses (appreciation) take center stage (p. 1).  Our center stage for many years has been to provide guides for students to learn about the relevance of psychological theories and frameworks in understanding personal lives through examples being enacted in lived experience as it is shared in the field of psychological practice. In the case of our focus on learning about psychological concepts through interpreting human dramas in cinematic films, our filmist approach, then, embraces a purpose that transcends the entertainment aspect of movie viewing.

Writing this book has been a lengthy and circuitous journey as we explored many shifts in our thinking, travelled to numerous destinations for conference presentations, and engaged in unforgettable experiences of learning. When we first began work on this book project many years ago, we were both teaching full-time in university courses, Nancy in a counselling psychology graduate program and in an innovative teacher education program, and Monica in several undergraduate psychology courses. At that time, we each had additional facets to our careers. Monica was finishing a doctoral program in cognitive and developmental psychology and Nancy was involved in a small counselling practice with women. In short, we were super-engaged in practice, leaving only small spaces in our lives for writing!

Our initial focus for writing this book was centred on sharing our unique ways of including cinematic films in teaching as we had both witnessed how student learning about psychological theories was enhanced and integrated through viewing true to life examples of the complexities of people’s lives.  Experiencing stories on screen, students were able to empathize with what the protagonists may have been thinking, sensing and feeling in their inner worlds, and in their relationships with personal others in the context of their life circumstances and the cultures in which they lived. To this end, we began tweaking our own methods of embedding films in our teaching, of exploring ways other educators had incorporated movies in their courses, and in conducting our own research. In this regard, Monica drew on her PhD dissertation and Nancy collected student papers that addressed a film interpretation assignment in   a course on adult development and learning. Once we had decided on the potential value of this project, we both began doing extensive library research and creating our own libraries on the value of film interpretation in many contexts, hence embarking on an intense learning process that continues to this day. Our working title at that time was, Bringing Psychology to Life: Using Films in Teaching to Illuminate Theories and Themes of the Human Journey.

Time marched on, we kept writing, meeting, and presenting papers on the subject, and we kept inspiring each other to continue with our march! Our lives changed, our careers made many changes, and yet we kept writing. And, we kept researching potential ways of expanding our ideas. It occurred to us, that while this book idea had begun primarily as one for college and university teachers, we are all teachers in many other contexts, and we are all learners. Perhaps as we have changed and gravitated more to our ongoing learning – Nancy, now a part-time counsellor, having retired from university teaching, and Monica having achieved the PhD and gradually moving to ever more part-time teaching - we have increasingly been drawn toward our roles as learners and writers. We still love films, we still enjoy interpreting them, and we would still like to share our ideas with more than each other. As a result, we are now considering a focus more in harmony with this reality, along with re-working our new possible title to reflect this: While we had many titles until our latest, they all included a reference to our key idea: to bring life to psychology via interpreting movies.  Our latest iteration honours our ongoing learning.

Because this book was conceived so many years ago, the films chosen by students and by us to exemplify theoretical concepts are necessarily representative of those popular in earlier times. Nevertheless, as the themes are timeless, we believe that the movies and their protagonists continue to speak to us about significant experiences and their meanings along life’s path.

Part I: THE HUMAN JOURNEY: TELLING OUR TALES

We turn now to opening the book with origin stories of our unique experiences with narratives to illustrate significant concepts deemed essential in the study of human sciences: Nancy’s as a teacher’s assistant in a Social Work course and Monica’s as a university student in Psychology. From this beginning, our individual interests in dramatic stories as a significant path to understanding the human journey converged in a specific focus on cinematic films as a teaching media for inspiring and integrating knowledge essential in the enterprises of psychology, counselling and adult development.  Join us as we describe how we initially conceived this common path to create our book project.

1. Nancy’s Story

There are few things more conducive to reverie than the prairie landscape along the road between Calgary, Alberta and Winnipeg, Manitoba. Aside from the occasional red-winged blackbird clinging to a cattail in a roadside marsh, there is little to interrupt one’s train of thought. It was spring-time, and we were on our way to visit our son and daughter-in-law in their new home. With the luxury of eight months to plan my graduate level course on adult learning and development my mind was wandering freely, alighting on one potentially creative plan after another. After all my years of university teaching, I still found planning courses one of the most inspiring aspects of my work, second only to my rich relationships with students. I was revelling in the time I had to think about books, films, articles, music, and ideas from previous courses and experiences that could bring life to the concepts of the adult journey.

As I watched the prairie rolling past us, I reflected on the threads of experience that had led to this recent contract to teach the development course at the University of Calgary: our move to Alberta, Canada; leaving behind a career in nursing to enter graduate school in social work at age 35; teaching and practicing in the field, and subsequently pursuing a doctorate in educational psychology at the University of Victoria; and finally being hired as an instructor by the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary. Because there was no full-time faculty position available when I finished my PhD, I began to focus my career around three main activities: part-time teaching of child development courses for the Early Childhood Education program in the Faculty of Education, the creation of personal growth courses for the Faculty of Continuing Education; and part-time counselling, primarily of adults. For three successive semesters, I also gained approval to instruct a course on Transpersonal Psychology – a focus of my doctoral thesis – as an elective in the Department of Educational Psychology.                  

It was in this course that a student introduced me to the possibilities of using films in teaching principles of adult development when she shared a videotaped presentation of a Jungian film analysis on Field of Dreams (Robinson, 1989). Between the memory of my first teaching experience of embedding stories in the curriculum and the recollection of this latter encounter with a visual narrative, the seed for using feature films as a vital learning method was firmly planted.

I have always been drawn by the power of film to transform the way we understand life and people’s experiences. Indeed, some years before our drive to Winnipeg I had also planned to include film analysis as a part of a continuing education course for adult learners. While that original course never saw the light of day, the notion of viewing films through a lens for adult learning guided my husband’s and my cinematic viewing from that time on. This was such an enriching way to delve deeply into films for us, it made sense to me that it might also enhance students’ viewing experiences and bring life to concepts central to a course on adult development.

As I continued my reverie, and scanned my mental filing cabinet, the first thing that popped into my consciousness was an assignment I assessed in my very first teaching experience: the professor for whom I was an assistant had created a list of fictional works that introduced a diversity of personal and societal issues from which students were to choose for a major essay assignment. These stories depicted the kind of people’s lived experience that were common in the worlds of the clients the beginning students would potentially encounter on their journeys toward becoming social work professionals. Recalling this foray into teaching at a time when I had learned right along with the students, I had a visceral memory of the power of this creative essay assignment to convey what no text could possibly emulate. First, I was introduced to classic novels from Canadian culture that were new to me as a recently transplanted American, such as The Stone Angel (Laurence, 1964) and Two Solitudes (MacLennan, 1945), and secondly, I learned more of the contexts in the culture that fleshed out significant meanings for the personal stories. With the knowledge of how this richness had affected me, the key idea that began to take root for my planning of this new course was to develop a film analysis assignment as a centerpiece for the course I was to devise. I surmised that including narrative films in the curriculum highlighting many key concepts of the human path of growth and development would also enrich film viewing experiences in general.

I recall how the excitement grew mile after mile on our journey east as the outline of the course began to take shape in my imagination. Once the idea had begun to form a loose structure, the details easily found their unique places inside the frame. I vacillated between spiraling through my thoughts and pausing to share my latest flash of insight with my husband (important pauses, because he both brought me down to earth and buoyed me up with interjecting ideas from his own counselling experience). By the time we reached Winnipeg, I was ready to capture this mind-work on hastily scribbled notes. Throughout the rest of that spring, summer, and fall, I fleshed out details, and by the winter semester I felt ready to launch the course.

In retrospect, it could be said that I ended up designing an entire course around the movie assignment, somewhat like a woman who completes her wardrobe around the shoes and jewels that first caught her eye. Although this is an exaggeration, my first thought when assigned to teach the course in our counselling psychology program did center on finding how I could infuse the magic of life stories into the curriculum.

While thinking about the value of integrating a film component in this course was a catalyst for my imagination, this was not a film course per se, and I was not actually thinking of showing a feature film in the course; rather it was a course on the interactions of development, learning, and cognition in adulthood. What I intended was designing an assignment around the interpretation of a film as a culmination of the students’ theoretical learning and as a vehicle for their understanding and application of development theories and frameworks. Further I was interested in discovering a way to aid these students, who were prospective counsellors, in a process of viewing peoples’ lives through more than one lens to experience the merit of acquiring multiple perspectives. From this, the students would hopefully be able to reflect on applying this expanded understanding to their work as counsellors of adults.

I introduced the film assignment in the beginning of my tenure as instructor of the course, and through the seven sessions from which I gathered the student papers for this work.

I made numerous changes to the overall course, but one constant was the film analysis assignment. The papers the students submitted consistently surpassed my expectations; by grasping the essence of key themes and the trajectories of life paths in the film characters’ lives, each student’s essay struck a deep chord in my own deeper understanding of the adult learning experience. From the beginning, I have wanted to share with others the wisdom embedded in their writings.

The course itself began with experiences designed to introduce students to some key concepts and commonly agreed-upon tasks of the adult journey, as well as to the diversity of frameworks and theories that has been conceptualized to understand the developmental path of adults. There are various stage theories of development (Erikson, 1950; Dabrowski, 1964;   Levinson, 1978, 1996), a life-span perspective of ongoing change (Kagan, 1980; Baltes, Reese & Lippit, 1980); and transition and change models (Perun & Bailey, 1980; Bridges, 2001; Goodmanet al., 2006; Bjorklund, 2011).  Each view holds assumptions influenced by historical era and/or cultural beliefs and values. Changing themes of gender development, for instance, have been heavily influenced by the era in which life has unfolded in the 20th and 21st centuries (Jordan, Kaplan, Miller, Stiver, & Surrey, 1991; Robb, 2006). Jungian psychologist Jean Bolen (1984; 1989) utilized a creative perspective for exploring diverse life stories by imaging gender archetypes as Greek Gods and Goddesses.

Among developmental theorists there has been an assumption of some goal or endpoint toward which adults travel, while in contrast, for theorists attending to life experiences and

transitions as markers along life’s journey, there is no specific endpoint; the journey is the key focus.  The idea of life as a journey, especially in the second half, was identified as a search for wholeness in Carl Jung’s psychological theory (1917, 1933, 1962, 1964). Other related mythological frameworks conceiving life development via the journey motif are Joseph Campbell’s work (1949) and Pearson’s model (1986). These latter ways of interpreting meaning in adult development are especially well-suited to film analysis.

Discussions about key authors of the various views, along with class exercises exploring common callings of adults as they move through life, provided a beginning context for all future course experiences. Although there are divergent views about ages and stages along the life path, several familiar concerns of adults generally surfaced in our early dialogues: relationships and intimacy, parenting, vocation, meaning, identity issues, finding home and community, revisiting past traumas, illnesses and aging, grief and loss, etc. Regardless of the diversity, one theme that focuses our attention throughout the course is transition. Whatever else adult development implies, transitions – identifiable shifts in one’s lived experience - are an inevitable part of the adventure.

One film that has always illustrated these theories and themes for me is Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. Featuring Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey and Donna Reed as George’s wife and soulmate Mary Hatch, it has been deemed a classic by many critics, probably because it includes many recognizable themes of adult experience, or possibly because George’s choices in life speak to the better angels of our nature. It lends itself to interpretation through such theories and frameworks as the Jungian conceptualization of individuation, various gender development perspectives, existential theories, and mythological and transition frameworks.

Although my husband and I had a wonderful time interpreting this film via Jung’s psychological theory, I decided to start here with the transition viewing point due to its nature as an overarching approach. Transitions characterize all life journeys, and with the obvious transitions in George’s life portrayed in the film, I have chosen to briefly highlight his story via these change-points, ones that could only be recognized retrospectively as significant when he was suffering through his pivotal mid-life crisis. Choice points for George often involved resisting a path of fiscal success and personal goals of self-interest in favour of love and human relatedness. His first decision as an adult meant an ending of his dream to travel the world following his father’s untimely death. Subsequent crises often involved George resisting a temptation to violate his values. Mr. Potter was the quintessential Shadow of Carl Jung’s theory, taunting George throughout the story.

George is wholly unaware of the significance of the choice-points he faces at critical times in his life, which began well before adulthood: As a pre-teen he saved his brother from drowning after he’d crashed through the ice on a pond while on his sled, and, as a delivery boy, he inadvertently saved another child’s life, along with the pharmacist’s, by letting the latter know of a potentially fatal mistake he’d made with a prescription. While the former act was likely human instinct, reporting to the pharmacist about his drug error required mature ethical decision-making and facing the druggist’s wrath. These incidents set the tone for many of his following life decisions, the first major one occurring after his father’s death which involved self-sacrifice when he chose to take over the family business rather than following his own dream. As is the case during many major turning points in one’s life, a ray of light can temper loss; for George, falling in love with Mary was his saving grace.

Shortly after they were married and ready to depart for their honeymoon, George and Mary were blindsided by a bank run on George’s Building and Loan business as the Great Depression of the ‘thirties’ blindsided the country. A crowd gathered at the bank in panic, wanting to withdraw their now perceived at-risk deposits; George attempted to calm their fears as he did not have anywhere near that much money available for refunds. Mary then waved the couple’s $2,000 travel money at George and he quickly used it to reassure his clients and save the business. He was left with $2.00 with which to rebuild.

This was a major turning point in George and Mary’s lives as they were willing to sacrifice their planned trip to save the community of friends who were also George’s clients. From a Jungian psychology perspective, Mary and George were coming from their feminine essence, which made community more important than their ego’s plans. It was also a matter of synchronistic unfolding, as at the end of the film the community came together to rescue George and the Building and Loan.

         Just as was identified in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey (1949), a wise guide was essential to George’s path of transformation via his role in awakening George to the meaning in his life experiences. The scene when George’s plan to take his own life was short-circuited by his immediate need to save Clarence, his guardian angel and guide, brought the theme of choice again to the forefront when he interrupted his own plan to address Clarence’s need. The role Clarence then performed was to take George through an alternate reality, one in which he’d never been born, which was an expressed wish of George after they both emerged from the water, newly baptized. This journey through a world without George showed him the true meaning of his life.

It’s a Wonderful Life has long been significant for me and resonated with me and my husband because it inspires us with similar what if questions about our own adult development: What if we’d never acted on our own choice point and moved to Canada? What if our children never had the experiences they’d gained in Alberta, never met their spouses? The potential thought experiments are endless.

With this sort of film and self-analysis in mind, I instructed the students in the course outline accordingly:

Interpret a selected film utilizing two or three of the frameworks discussed in class and in your readings (e.g., Jungian psychological theory, transition framework, framework of a major developmental theorist, gender framework, etc.) Begin the paper by sharing what drew you to this film, i.e., what it has meant for you in your own life, followed by a short synopsis of the movie and a brief sketch of the selected frameworks. The body of the paper will consist of a discussion of the film and protagonist (s) according to the chosen frameworks/theories. In conclusion, discuss what you learned through this assignment – about yourself, about adult development, and about how viewing stories through various lenses can aid the counselling process. A class experience in interpreting a film will provide additional guidelines. Include references to literature as appropriate relative to the framework selected. The purpose of this paper is to enhance your awareness of how to apply theories and/or frameworks to understanding adults’ lives, hence, how to apply such knowledge in counselling practice.

Students often chose films for interpretation that had been those that had spoken to their lives, their own journeys. What this meant for me was being exposed to a wide variety of unfamiliar films each semester that I instructed the course – a welcome aspect of my own ongoing learning.

Because student life revolves so much around planning for and completing assignments, the requirements for the course formed a backdrop for everything else that happened. Right from the start, students in this course each year began thinking about what film they would interpret and what frameworks of development they would choose to explore for another major assignment, which focused on transitions in adult life. In the beginning years of the course, students had three options from which to choose for a third assignment: Weekly journal entries, article reviews, or an interpretation of their own focused life story. Eventually, the third paper centred on juxtaposing their own life experiences with two texts on gender development (Robb, 2006 and Sanborn, 2007).

Additional to some of the developmental theorists introduced at the beginning of the course, a variety of frameworks comprised the whole curriculum, therefore students were advised to keep an open mind about what frameworks or theories might work for a selected film or for their own story. For example, a couple of sessions in the middle of the semester focused on exploring gender frameworks, and the insights gleaned from our dialogues in this arena were exceptionally fertile for making sense of a film protagonist’s experience.

After a few sessions of the course, I began to collaborate with Monica Baehr, a doctoral student at the time who was taking the class as one of her electives. Her dissertation had taken a turn when she became excited by the possibilities of doing research on the use of films in teaching for what was then Mount Royal College; her study subsequently became integrated into this book project as crucial. With this, Monica became the co-author for the book.

Our partnership since has been a blending of our unique academic backgrounds and experiences: Monica is a technophile; I am a technophobe. But both of us share a love of movies, a passion about teaching, and an ongoing quest for novel ways to bring contents and its understanding to students. After our beginning brain-storming sessions, Monica began to form an intense involvement with the theoretical, empirical, and practical literature on the use of cinematic films in the field of teaching. She had already been integrating the use of feature films in her own teaching of psychology courses with impressive results. Several classical psychological theories that were central to her curriculum were used to demonstrate their use in film interpretation. A systematic examination of the findings from her research constituted her doctoral dissertation and is summarized in this work.

Although it was never an explicit aspect of the film assignment for the student to explore in any depth the psychological, relationship, or cultural issue or issues embedded in the films, the ones selected have tended to include narratives of crisis, trauma, change, and transitions, in other words, themes of lived experience psychologists might be expected to encounter in their practices. This exposure to common issues faced by film protagonists offered an additional learning opportunity to emerge from this exercise. In the films critiqued in this volume, primary characters faced a wide range of these issues: relationship dynamics (couple, parent-child, and friends); family dysfunction; gender issues; domestic violence; alcoholism; poverty; sexual abuse; terminal illness; accidents and disabilities; suicide; imprisonment; conditions of war; cultural diversity; divorce; grief and loss; prostitution; social class; and spiritual angst. Whatever the obstacles faced, an over-arching theme of all the stories featured in this book is that of individuation: the experience of the protagonist(s) moving toward an increasingly authentic existence and wresting meaning from the common life experiences and struggles inherent in being human. This is our calling on the adult journey.

It is our hope that by presenting the various perspectives through which one can view a life, and by sharing the interpretations of characters in films from popular culture, we will be opening more windows for readers to see their own and others’ life stories in a new light.

Using cinematic films as the focus of a core assignment is only one of numerous ways that this medium can be integrated into courses to enhance student learning. Following our introductions in Part I, Monica presents an overview of her scholarly research in Part II, starting with a review of the many ways movies have featured in a variety of academic courses and concluding with her own inclusion of films in her courses. In Part III, she discusses psychodynamic and philosophical frameworks in psychology, along with examples for analyzing classic films. Frameworks in psychology for interpretation, including psychological and developmental theories comprise my descriptions in Part IV. A host of examples from Monica’s and my students’ interpretations provide relevant illustrations throughout.

In Parts III and IV, Monica and I take different approaches to share examples of applying the process of film interpretation. Monica presents key psychological theories which she describes in depth and then focuses on one film for each to highlight exemplars of the theory in question, while I focus on illustrating the frameworks and theories I present that are relevant to the adult journey by drawing on pertinent illustrations embedded in student papers. These shall be cited with the student’s surname, and readers directed to Appendix A for the list of these papers. We hope that both approaches provide guidance for readers to expand on their own initial understandings of why certain movies became significant in their lives. Students’ reflections on their learning comprise Part V, along with our own discussion encompassing the significant learning that continues to enrich our lives and our work with others on our life paths.  We turn now to Monica’s introductory story.

2. Monica’s Story

Through the years as I practiced psychology and then turned to teaching in higher education, I tried to find ways to engage others and myself. We gain knowledge and learn to be professionals, but our heart has to be in the process to make it work and last. We need mutual awareness and a sense of purpose, making our venture enjoyable even as it takes effort and commitment. How our personal engagement is achieved depends a great deal on our unique qualities and preferences. I agree with Nancy that it is important to weave some of our own experiences into the discussion of why and how we decided to incorporate movies into teaching.

Psychology draws together many other fields and disciplines. I also enjoy literature, history, politics, philosophy, technology, and the arts. Within a broad perspective, I kept looking for ways to illustrate academic concepts, connecting abstract and often archaic terms with contemporary life. Case examples are common and helpful but limited as a demonstration of real life. Instead, using entire stories seems natural when dealing with shared experiences and everyday as well as extraordinary lives. Stories present characters in context and over time, allowing us to understand him or her as if an actual person. From oral storytelling since prehistoric times, to ballads, epic poems, plays, and novels, we invented motion pictures and refined them for more than a century to create a multifaceted and sophisticated medium. Movies have not replaced other narrative means, but they are a great and popular form of storytelling today. While evolving platforms and techniques increasingly move us into digital realms such as elaborate gaming and interactive adventures, we believe that motion pictures on large screens and small remain compelling and imaginative vehicles for telling a tale. Our work, therefore, continues to focus on this way of illustrating rich and intricate characters and scenarios that can be larger than life, but still realistic enough for the viewer to relate to them.

Like most people, I watch movies for entertainment. Beyond that, who wouldn’t give a thought to levels of writing, production, direction, and acting? However, a critical eye for the many aspects of moviemaking is normally reserved for film critics or film studies programs. As I began to teach at university, it didn’t occur to me to incorporate films into academic courses, using them as full-bodied case examples in class discussions and written work. That changed when I participated in Nancy’s course on adult development during my doctoral studies. Using different media for written and filmed examples wasn’t new, but in Nancy’s class I saw how cinematic film can be a doorway to teaching and learning complex concepts and variations on a theme. It was fascinating and captured my imagination. Now, graduate students are independent learners and trusted to watch the assigned film on their own, coming together for lectures and discussion with the movie as focus. Such a strategy is not always feasible in other settings, as we shall see in my own work that grew out of Nancy’s approach. Fortunately, we can find many other ways to illustrate concepts and theories with movies. They are, after all, our mirror.

Once I was hooked, I decided to conduct my Ph.D. research on the very topic of teaching and learning with films. At the same time, I explored how to adapt this approach to my undergraduate classes, where much more guidance and structure are required. Part II of this book will be devoted to describing my research study and classroom application. Since that study was completed and made into my dissertation years ago, I have been observing, experimenting, and refining my strategies at the undergraduate level. Part of the charm of this approach is the flexibility, and the lessons both Nancy and I learned in our own realms can be adapted to other disciplines and levels of education.

While Nancy had been teaching mostly in social work and educational psychology, my specialties have been abnormal psychology and personality theory. Both areas are ideally suited for film stories as case examples