Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry

This book explores how psychoanalytic psychiatry and Hollywood cinema negotiated women’s psychosexuality and life experience during the mid-twentieth century. The author’s readings of films including The Snake Pit, The Three Faces of Eve, and Freud, in conjunction with such cultural objects as marriage manuals, pharmaceutical ads, and letters from psychiatrists to motion-picture personnel, responds to the challenge to understand film and filmic representations of women and psychiatry in their wider cultural contexts.

“Couching Resistance marvelously confirms how the very best achievements in film contribute in central ways to the work of cultural studies…This exciting and rich study is of intense importance to film scholars, cultural analysts, critical theorists, feminist historians, and anyone concerned with the interweaves of gender, mass cultural representations, and new technologies of the self.” — Dana Polan