Psychiatry and the Cinema

The first edition of Psychiatry and the Cinema appeared in 1987. Now released in a second edition, it remains the definitive inquiry about that curious bedfellowship of psychiatry and American film that has flourished since the medium’s advent near the century’s turn. The book is the product of a felicitous partnership between brothers Glen O. Gabbard and his brother Krin Gabbard, a prominent film/jazz scholar.

The discussion is both comprehensive and deep… . Any moviegoer eager to understand his or her own response to films will find these analyses provocative.

I thoroughly enjoyed Psychiatry and the Cinema… . If you have even a passing interest in psychiatry and film, you will want to read this book. If you have more than a passing interest, you will want to read it more than once.

I largely enjoyed reading this book and will be pleased to have it as a reference as the inevitable additional films about psychiatry continue to be produced. I suspect that psychiatrist now depicted as succeeding only with the talking cure may well start to be represented by psychopharmacologists, neurophysiologists, brain imagists, and others as Hollywood catches up with the neurosciences in the future.

Now released in a second edition, it remains the definitive inquiry about that curious bedfellowship of psychiatry and American film that has flourished since the medium’s advent near the century’s turn.

Glen O. Gabbard, M.D., is Professor and Director of the Baylor Psychiatry Clinic at the Baylor College of Medicine and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute in Houston, Texas. He was previously Director of the Menninger Hospital in Topeka, Kansas. Dr. Gabbard is the author or editor of sixteen books and currently is joint Editor-in-Chief and Editor for North America of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. His numerous awards include the 2000 Mary Sigourney Award for outstanding contributions to psychoanalysis.

Krin Gabbard, Ph.D., teaches film, literature, and cultural studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is author of Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (1996) and editor of Jazz Among the Discourses (1995) and Representing Jazz (1995). He is currently working on a book about movies, masculinity, and music.