Journal of Analytical Psychology (2014) - Matte Blanco and Narrative: Hitchcock's Vertigo by Sanchez-Cardenas, M.
Details
- article: Matte Blanco and Narrative: Hitchcock's Vertigo by Sanchez-Cardenas, M. (book review)
- author(s): Hessel Willemsen
- journal: Journal of Analytical Psychology (01/Sep/2014)
- issue: volume 59, issue 4, pages 606-609
- DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12104_5
- journal ISSN: 0021-8774
- publisher: Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, British Film Institute, Pierre Boileau, Psycho (1960), Thomas Narcejac, Vertigo (1958)
Links
Article
Sanchez-Cardenas, M. (2013). ‘Matte Blanco and narrative: Hitchcock's Vertigo’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 94, 825–40.
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, directed and produced in 1958 and based on the 1954 novel D’entre les morts (The living and the dead) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, remains a piece of cinematographic art. Art is impressionable, inviting a reader or viewer to consider different narratives belonging to the individually evoked experience. Sanchez-Cardenas aims to provide an understanding of how different narratives in the movie have been discovered and are still to be explored, using the unconscious axes introduced by Matte Blanco. As the title suggests, the viewer tumbles deeply into Hitchcock's dazzling unconscious only to recover a sense of reality towards the end of the movie together with Scottie, the main character of the movie. Sanchez-Cardenas's psychoanalytic reading of the plot, using Matte Blanco's logical theory of the structured repressed unconscious, makes for new interpretations and understandings of this famous movie. Vertigo is the British Film Institute's most popular film of all time, over and above the many essays and reviews already written.
Sanchez-Cardenas takes the reader through a brief summary of Matte Blanco's theory, who by building on Freud's concepts of condensation and displacement introduced the concepts of symmetry and asymmetry. The author sets out to describe the different modes, symmetry and asymmetry, which are situated in strata, to develop Matte Blanco's model of the mind. With increasing consciousness there is more asymmetry while w...
References
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- Grotstein, J.S. (1996). Thinking, Feeling and Being: Clinical Reflections on the Fundamental Antinomy of Human Beings and World. By Ignacio Matte-Blanco. London: Routledge, 1988.
- Matte-Blanco, I. (2005). ‘The four antinomies of the death instinct’. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 86, 1463–76.