Cinema therapy

How some shrinks are using movies to help their clients cope with life and just feel better.

By Daniel Mangin

May 27, 1999 | During the early days of home video, psychoanalyst Foster Cline treated a woman whose wild and uncommunicative child resisted the slightest display of maternal affection. It occurred to the doctor that his patient might benefit from seeing how Anne Sullivan dealt with the similarly rebellious Helen Keller, so he asked her to pop "The Miracle Worker" into the VCR.

Arthur Penns 1962 film about Keller and her teacher didn't work a miracle but, according to Cline, "the client learned from it how to set limits with a difficult child and saw that some children need to be held whether they like it or not." He found the experiment so successful he began to assign "video homework" to patients on a regular basis. Today many other therapists and mental-health professionals do the same, and some suggest that videos can help you even if you're not in therapy.

Will "Field of Dreams" see you through a midlife crisis? Can "Groundhog Day" help you visualize your way out of a rut? What with America's penchant for quick fixes, one can't help but look askance at a recipe for personal evolution incorporating a pastime as popular as movie watching. But what goes by the name "video work" and "cinema therapy" is not without precedent. Aristotle, after all, theorized that tragic plays have the capacity to purify the spirit and aid us in coping with those aspects of life that cannot be reconciled by rational thought. Applying the concept in the 20th century, psychoanalytic critics have postulated that films, because of their dreamlike quality, transmit ideas through emotion rather than intellect, in some cases neutralizing the instinct to repress. One illustration of this: Some people will cry buckets over a sentimental movie but rarely in real life, even under duress.

Cline, now semi-retired, describes video watching as an "immersive experience involving sound, sight and a positive outcome." He says "Films show how problem solving can be accomplished, and since many movies are fairly true to life, the situations often closely mirror a client's. I think 'Stepmom' is the best film I've ever seen about how a parent can handle his or her death for a child. A therapist could also use 'Stepmom' to illustrate the anger that takes place between birth and stepparents and how this can undermine any children involved. If I had people fussing and feuding over a kid I'd demand they see 'Stepmom' and ask each of them which character is most like you."

Another recent film about parent-child relationships Cline gives two thumbs up is "Life Is Beautiful": "The father makes being in a concentration camp a game, and the child survives the situation quite well. It's a psychiatric truth that kids handle situations about as well as the adults around them do."

Cline isn't aware of any studies tracking the effects of video watching in a therapeutic setting but says he doesn't need research to know this works. "With some things you just have to say they're obvious and you don't need hard proof. You just know if you get a client to watch a particular movie and the person 'gets' what's going on, you'll be able to make some progress."

As with any treatment that shows promise, some proponents of video healing make extravagant claims. Gary Solomon, a psychotherapist and the author of "The Motion Picture Prescription," a video guide top-heavy with simplistic works like "Beaches" and "Rocky," goes so far as to propose that "prison and jail administrators can show movies to the inmates that will change the way they think, feel and do things for the rest of their lives." Cathie Glenn Sturdevant, author of "The Laugh & Cry Movie Guide," would probably whip up the cons a batch of Jiffy Pop: "The touch, smell, and taste of popcorn on our fingers and in our mouths in conjunction with the sights and sounds of a film can open the doorway to a whole new realm of energizing possibilities," she writes in her book.

That the "The Mummy" or "Phantom Menace" -- with or without popcorn -- might alter a person's mental-health status seems beyond dubious, but before dismissing the healing potential of commercial cinema entirely, consider the case of Norman Cousins. The late author and editor wrote famously in his book "Anatomy of an Illness" about watching humorous films as part of his recovery from what had been diagnosed as terminal cancer. He found that "ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep." Sturdevant concludes in "Laugh & Cry" that Cousins "cured himself of a life-threatening illness by laughing at Marx Brothers movies," but this simplifies the matter: They were one component of a regimen that included vitamin C, dietary changes and other responses. Cousins' experience does hint, however, that beyond elevating mood, watching movies can, in tandem with psychotherapy or other treatments, be worthwhile.

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