1980 (144 mins)
Directors: Stanley Kubrick

A family relocates to an isolated hotel for the winter, where a sinister presence influences the father into episodes of violence while his psychic son sees horrifying forebodings from the past and the future.

Psychoanalytic Takes on the Cinema: Discussion of the Film: “The Shining”

Date: October 25, 2024

Time: 4:00pm – 5:30pm

Presenter: Alex Smith, PsyD

Where: Via Zoom

Registration Link: Here

Program Flyer: Here

Registration Deadline: October 23, 2o24

Presentation Description:

As in all great horror cinema, Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) uses the haunted house motif to iterate upon essential human problems. The Torrances have kept their most overwhelming thoughts and feelings at some precarious distance, only to encounter them in toto in the Overlook Hotel, a repository of cast-off intrapsychic material. Jack Torrance’s thinly-veiled rage and vulnerability, now laid bare, plunges the family into unboundaried chaos. Kubrick’s interest in the border between constriction and absurdism adds additional layers to the film, where what at first seems to be comical visual chaff adds not only texture, but meaningful fragments of disallowed impulses.

In horror cinema—where less conscious thoughts and feelings are realized in ghastly acts and fantastical forms—the haunted house remains an evergreen motif. Indeed, the haunted location remains a nearly universal fascination, reaching across cultures and generations. Like other horror motifs, the haunted house represents an exercise in the cozily distanced investigation of the most painful aspects of the human experience. What might be overwhelming if recognized and processed internally is parceled out onto the external. Ghosts, hallways gushing blood, and iced over hedge mazes—while less human and fantastical—become containers for our most primal fears, conflicts, and overwhelming ideas.

Together, we will consider the horror narrative from a psychoanalytic lens, and the haunted house motif specifically. From there, we will develop some rudimentary morphology within the idea of projection, taking an interest in the idea of the disembodied and the embodied as overlapping yet unique projective mechanisms. With these general ideas in tow, we will investigate the rendering of the thematic material within the implausible and the absurd in The Shining.