The Process of Free Association and Film as an Evocative Object

Abstract

This chapter addresses how contingency can become a creative part of language, dialogue and spectatorship, through a discussion of the free associative dimension of film experience and of film as an evocative object. A return to the theoretical import of the method and the process of free association in psychoanalytic theory is offered, through a particular focus on the work of Jean-Bertrand Pontalis and Christopher Bollas, as an alternative approach to a psychoanalytic theory of film experience which foregrounds the dialogic nature of the psychoanalytic encounter and of psychic experience as such.