Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry

This study of how Freudian psychiatry was translated into American films after World War II provides serious yet accessible reading. Walker traces the relationship between psychiatry and women, and shows how mental health experts, mostly male, regarded women's mental health as a set of problems to be normalized by consigning women to traditional roles, such as the happy homemaker. Walker also offers insight into how filmmakers presented psychiatric discourse to the public through such films as Spellbound , Bedlam , The Snake Pit , The Three Faces of Eve and Lilith. Throughout, Walker discusses how certain figures, both male and female, in films and medical discourse--such as Karen Horney in the psychoanalytic world and John Huston in his film Freud --resisted classically Freudian ideas about women. Generously illustrated with film stills and magazine advertisements, this work should have crossover appeal to nonacademic readers with interests in cinema, psychiatry or women's issues. Walker teaches film studies at the University of Southern California. (Mar.)