What moves us in moving images? A psychoanalytic investigation of spectatorship

Abstract

In this project, drawing mainly on the psychoanalytic theories of the BritishIndependent Group, I explore how spectators psychically choose, relate to, and usemoving images to negotiate and transform emotional experiences, particularly incontexts marked by collective trauma and political conflict.

I conducted two semi-structured interviews with ten adults, five from Iran and five from Northern Ireland; two regions where individuals have lived through prolonged histories of sociopolitical violence. I used Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI) method, which focuses on participants’ free associations alongside the concept of reverie, a receptive state attuned to emotional communication. Together, FANI and reverie helped me stay attuned to both the conscious and unconscious, as well as verbal and nonverbal dimensions of communication, during data production and interpretation.

Drawing on an original dataset, this study shows how moving images help spectators to navigate personal conflict and contain collective suffering. Based on participants’ narratives, I argue that moving images are not merely reflections of life but companions to it, objects that hold, transform, and sustain psychic life when reality feels too hard to bear. In this sense, we use moving images as companions to psychic survival, entertaining us not merely through pleasure, but also through their capacity to entertain and sustain the life of the mind.

The findings of this project offer rare empirical evidence and clarity of the psychic processes shaping spectatorship understood through a relational psychoanalytic framework, an area which has often been explored at a theoretical level. This thesis provides novel empirical grounding for theorising and deepening understanding of the processes of containment and dreaming with moving images, contributing valuable insights to psychoanalytic theory, clinical practice, as well as film and media studies literature focused on the experience of actual spectators.

Date of Award	Oct 2025
Original language	English
Supervisor	Maggie Long (Supervisor), Noreen Giffney (Supervisor) & Caroline Bainbridge (Supervisor)