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Introduction : les spectres de nos présents

Jacques Demange
Introduction to the seventh issue of the journal Transcr(é)ation, which provides an introductory framework for examining the relationships between psychoanalysis, cinema, and television and revisits the contributions featured in this issue while.

Ozu sans complexe : fantasme oedipien et inconscient filmographique

Quentin Barrois
In Ozu ou l’anti-cinéma (1998), Kijû Yoshida describes the ending of one of Yasujirō Ozu’s masterpieces, Late Spring (1949), as structured by an Oedipal situation. A widowed father feigns an intention to remarry in order to persuade his daughter to accept marriage and thus separate from him. The film portrays a young woman reluctant to leave her father, who only resolves to do so upon discovering his supposed desire for another woman, while the father himself hesitates to relinquish her. During their final trip, the two sleep side by side, and a shot of a vase is inserted into the shot/reverse-shot sequence, as if to part them, even to signal the prohibition surrounding a silent desire. Probably the most famous of Ozu’s peridiegetic shots (or “pillow shots”, Burch, 1984), this image has prompted numerous interpretations, many of them resisting Yoshida’s claim that the vase veils a latent erotic tension. This article argues that the scene belongs to a recurrent Oedipal motif in Ozu’s cinema, embedded within a relational network structuring the daughter’s ties to those around her. A broader analysis of Ozu’s work – notably Late Autumn (1960), Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941) and Early Summer (1951) – enables us to identify an Ozuian familial complex organising the circulation of desire across the filmography. In doing so, the peridiegetic shot emerges as a screen device (Lojkine, 2005) through which the critical and political significance of Ozu’s post-war “late period” (1949–1962), inaugurated by Late Spring, may be reconsidered.

Compulsion de répétition et représentations filmiques : de l’Histoire à l’hystoire

Daphnée Guerdin
In 1996, South Korean filmmaker Jang Sun-woo first tackled the Gwangju massacre, a taboo incident which he portrayed as a historical trauma in his movie A Petal. Featuring an allegorical character representing Korea as a victim of its dictatorial government, the film induces a compulsion to repeat – or empty repetition of the trauma – both intra- and extra-diegetically. Like the protagonist of this seminal film, the works that follow in its footsteps continue to repeat the trauma through the trajectories of their characters, but also through obsessive, reiterated forms. However, these redundancies are akin to a path to healing, allowing, through a fictional dialectic proposed chronologically over some forty years, the (re)construction of a more glorious history from the trauma – an uprising instead of a massacre.

Trauma, spectralité et post-mémoire : la psychanalyse à l’épreuve du cinéma coréen des « femmes de réconfort »

Hwa-Yeon Chaumier
This article offers a psychoanalytic reading of three Korean films — Tuning Fork, Snowy Road, and Spirits’ Homecoming — dedicated to the historical trauma of the “comfort women.” This colonial past, long denied and repressed by official history as well as by collective shame, returns to haunt the contemporary Korean screen. The study relies on a triple conceptual constellation: the psychoanalysis of trauma (Freudian notions of deferred action and repetition compulsion, revisited by Cathy Caruth), Abraham and Torok’s psychic crypt, and Derrida’s hauntology. Spectrality thus becomes the central theoretical operator, functioning as the manifestation of the repressed real. The films analyzed emerge as genuine psychoanalytic devices: they do not merely reconstruct past events but formally elaborate the trauma. By portraying the suffering of the survivors and opening a space for shared memory, these visual narratives of return foster the construction of a collective memory of trauma. Spectrality functions as a politics of memory, demanding justice for the disappeared and engaging an intergenerational responsibility. Placing these films in the perspectives of cultural trauma and its social construction, the article shows how testimonies, ritual gestures, and civic inscriptions establish a public space for recognition and symbolic reparation. In conclusion, cinema acts as a form of postmemory, in Marianne Hirsch’s sense. By transforming spectral haunting into a vector of transmission, it allows the inheriting generation to imaginatively invest the trauma and pursue the work of collective mourning.

Acteurs et actrices sur le divan : déjouer et rejouer l’inconscient : jouer malgré soi

Baptiste André
This article analyzes the performances of Hollywood actors and actresses through the lens of psychoanalysis, considering the filmed body as the site of emergence of a bodily unconscious. Drawing on Freudian concepts of symptoms and the return of the repressed, as well as André Green's work on the “work of the negative,” the study explores those pivotal moments when gestures transcend the technicality of acting to reveal biographical cracks and buried emotions. This psychoanalytic approach allows us to redefine the value of gestural detail in acting studies, thinking of it not only as an interpretive resource, but as a place of friction where the screen becomes a space of transference, allowing us to grasp, in the detail of a tremor or a glance, the truth of a subject who acts in spite of themselves.

De l’image incorporée à l’image introjectée : deuil et nourriture à l’épreuve du divan

Tatiana Horbaczewski
This article analyses three contemporary culinary films – La passion de Dodin Bouffant (Trần Anh Hùng, 2023), Hunger (Sitisiri Mongkolsiri, 2023) and Toast (S. J. Clarkson, 2010) – which closely link the taste experience with the act of mourning (romantic, professional and maternal). Based on the concept of incorporation, considered as a matrix of introjection, the article shows how food ingestion becomes the symbolic materialisation of a psychological process that unfolds in three phases: satisfaction, destruction and assimilation. La passion de Dodin Bouffant depicts instinctual satisfaction by linking erotic desire and food desire; Hunger radicalises the destructive dimension of incorporation by exposing the archaic violence of hunger; finally, Toast depicts the transition from melancholic incorporation to introjection, using the motif of toast as a metaphor for the act of mourning. The study combines narrative analysis, figurative analysis and figural analysis to show that, in these films, the invisibility of the psyche is not only narrated or symbolised, but made sensitive, thereby engaging a form of “incorporation” of images in the viewer. The article therefore proposes to think of the cinematic experience itself as a process of ingestion and transformation: to watch a film is to incorporate images that may later be introjected.

Héritage freudien et esthétique de la fertilité dans le film spatial français

Clovis Bezies-Gros
In High Life (2018) and Proxima (2019), space travel shifts from the spectacular toward an intimate exploration. Echoing the “three humiliations” formulated by Freud in A Difficulty in Psychoanalysis (1917), the cosmos no longer appears as a territory to be conquered, but as a space of de-centering where the loss of centrality, the biological inscription of the human, and the subject’s psychic division are put to the test. The motifs of fluid and water, associated with themes of reproduction and pregnancy, structure an aesthetics of fertility. Tested bodies, organic metamorphoses, and the circulation of matter inscribe humanity within a vulnerable continuity of the living, helping to reinscribe the black immensity of the cosmos within a dynamic of transmission. The spacecraft, conceived as a closed and reflexive space, thus functions as a psychoanalytic space: it reconfigures filiation, stages the question of origins, and gives form to intimate conflicts. These narratives therefore interrogate the project of an extraterrestrial humanity less as a promise of mastery than as a revealer of the constitutive fragilities of the human condition.

Du réel freudien au Réel lacanien : (Psych)analyser l’oeuvre de Quentin Dupieux

Pierre Jeffroy
While Dupieux’s connection to hypnosis, surrealism, and nonsense—and, through them, to the unconscious and its radical strangeness—make his cinema a privileged object of psychoanalytic inquiry, his films nonetheless paradoxically display an obsessive quest for the real and for the most ordinary banality. This apparent contradiction dissolves once one returns to Freud and then to Lacan. The pursuit of the ordinary can initially be understood in light of Freud’s concept of the “uncanny,” which allows us to grasp how strangeness emerges from repetition and everyday life, as a return of the repressed. Turning to Lacan then makes it possible to probe this quest more deeply, by measuring the gap between the real—that impossible thing against which Dupieux’s characters constantly collide—and the reality of the phenomenal world. It is the former that truly concerns Dupieux: the real as a mystery, a void, a gap around which his filmography endlessly gravitates, seeking to plumb its full nonsensical depth.

Traumatismes et stratégies de survie dans le cinéma de M. Night Shyamalan : refoulement, dissociation et négation de la réalité

Mathilde Mille
This article offers an interpretation of M. Night Shyamalan's films based on psychological defense mechanisms and their spatial representation. It analyzes how Shyamalan's direction serves to highlight pathology : it materializes the neuroses and defense mechanisms that structure the protagonists' experiences. In the filmmaker's work, the narrative almost always arises from an initial trauma — loss, accident, abuse — which shapes the characters and organizes their environment. Space plays a central role in this dynamic. Through a psychoanalytical approach to his characters, Shyamalan explores their neuroses. Often confined to closed and unstable spaces, they project their inner fragmentation onto spaces that are themselves divided. The staging visually conveys this dynamic : fragmentation of the frame, closed spaces, ambivalent domestic spaces. The house, a metonymy for the family unit, becomes the scene of an intimate threat where the disturbing emerges from the familiar. Closed spaces also reflect a defensive response to an unbearable reality, transforming survival into both a psychological and physical challenge. The study highlights how denial, repression, and dissociation drive the narrative progression, often revealed through flashbacks. Shyamalan's cinema thus appears as an exploration of the unconscious strategies that make trauma bearable, where the organization of space becomes the visible materialization of an inner struggle.

Esthétique de la psychanalyse : la série comme laboratoire de l’inconscient

Benjamin Flores
This article examines contemporary television series as an aesthetic apparatus of the unconscious. Through an analysis of The Sopranos, In Treatment, and The Patient, it argues that psychoanalysis functions not merely as narrative content but as a structural principle. Serial form operates through repetition, delay, and reopening rather than closure. Each episode resembles an analytic session; each season unfolds as a cycle of transference and resistance. Meaning emerges retroactively, mirroring Freud’s concept of deferred action (Nachträglichkeit). In The Sopranos, the therapist’s office serves as the symbolic unconscious core of the narrative. In Treatment intensifies this structure by centering drama on speech, silence, and listening. The Patient reverses the analytic framework, turning transference into literal captivity. Formally, these series translate psychoanalytic processes—repression, repetition, displacement—through fragmentation, ellipsis, and temporal suspension. The spectator becomes implicated in a dynamic of transference, transforming viewing into a diffuse analytic experience. Contemporary serial television thus emerges as a privileged site where fiction enacts, rather than simply represents, the logic of the unconscious and redefines modern subjectivity.

Esthétique du clivage : dissociation et aliénation psychique dans la série Severance

Marilyn Gomez-Lemery
This article analyses the series Severance (Dan Erickson, Apple TV+, 2022–2025) as an aesthetic and critical representation of psychological dissociation and neoliberal alienation in the workplace. Building on the fictional device of "severance" between professional memory (Inter) and personal memory (Exter), the series does not merely represent a managerial dystopia: it converts dissociation into a scenographic, narrative, and sensory principle. By drawing on concepts from psychoanalysis (Freud, Winnicott, Green, Lacan) and critical philosophy (Deleuze, Guattari), the article shows how the sanitised architecture of Lumon Industries, temporal fragmentation, sound breaks, and absurd rituals materialise psychic mechanisms such as splitting, repression, disbinding and the capture of desire. Space is analysed as a transitional anti-space that prevents any symbolisation, while the editing and unstable temporality produce an experience of alienation shared by the viewer. The study also highlights an "aesthetic of alertness," based on silent but revealing visual and auditory signs that denounce the symbolic violence of contemporary organisations without resorting to explicit discourse. Finally, the article identifies lines of flight—gestures of rebellion, returns of the repressed, bodily resistance—which show that dissociation, although radical, leaves traces of subjectivity. Severance thus appears as an aesthetic and political laboratory of contemporary subjectivation.

L’écran comme divan : fantasmes collectifs et psychanalyse télévisuelle dans En Thérapie

Carole Martin
In 2021, the French series En thérapie (In Therapy) has been a huge success thanks to its desire to make the psychoanalytic scene between an analyst and their patient visible to the viewer. However, an analysis of the series' scenographic and dialogic process shows that En thérapie is more of a conscious or unconscious staging of the collective imagination and fantasies about psychoanalytic practice. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, the series thus questions the limits and challenges of a televised representation of psychoanalytic treatment. This article analyses how the series En thérapie depicts psychoanalysis on television, as well as the effects of this representation on the audience. It aims to show how analytical treatment is fantasised on screen and how viewers find themselves in an intrusive position, before examining the dialogue that the series establishes between literature, fiction and reality. This articulation allows us to understand how psychoanalytic concepts and the practice of therapy are perceived, as well as the consequences of this portrayal on viewers. The article thus focuses on the role of television representation in constructing and maintaining a collective, often fantasised image of what "authentic" psychoanalytic therapy would be like.