Footnote #62 - Object Relations

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes complete their unofficial ‘psychoanalysis trilogy’ with this look at object relations and a branch of psychoanalytic approaches to film that emerged as a competing way of thinking about cinema linked to the development of the conscious minds of children. Listen as Alex takes Chris through the contributions of the British Psychoanalytical Society and the influential work of Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott; the value of unconscious fantasies, creativity, and what it means to theorise play; cinema as a potentially “transitional” (and cultural) object that we can use to fantasise with; using object relations theory to think about what kind of object a film might be, and the specificity of fantasy filmmaking as ‘extra transitional’; and what a focus on objects says about how children can and do formulate relationships to the world.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

• Carroll, Noel, and David Bordwell. 1996. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

• Garcia, Carla Ambrósio. 2017. Bion in Film Theory and Analysis: The Retreat in Film. London: Routledge.

• Klein, Melanie. 1984. Narrative of a Child Analysis: The Conduct of the Psycho-analysis of Children as Seen in the Treatment of a Ten Year Old Boy. New York: The Free Press.

• Kuhn, Annette. 2013. Little Madnesses: Winnicott, Transitional Phenomena and Cultural Experience. London: I.B. Tauris.

• Sergeant, Alexander. 2014. “Zack Snyder's Impossible Gaze: The Fantasy of "looked- at- ness" manifested in Sucker Punch (2011).” In Sensational Pleasures in Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture: The Phallic Eye, edited by Gilad Padva and ‎Nurit Buchweitz, 127-139. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Winnicott, D. W. 1953. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34: 89-97.

  Winnicott, D.W. 1999. Playing and Reality. London and New York: Routledge.