Edith Sullwold Memorial Lecture:
The Child in Twenty-First Century Film

Presented by John Beebe, M.D. 

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In this presentation, John Beebe will weave excerpts from three recent films to explore the relationship of the cinematic presentation of the child to prospects for the contemporary psyche and the future of the culture. John got his start in the mental health profession as a teenager, working as a volunteer with autistic children. Since that time, he has noticed how defenses of the self in adult patients often involve strategies designed to protect the healthy core of the original child that is so frequently misunderstood. He has long himself been what he describes as a ‘sucker’ for movies depicting an only—or lonely—child. 

Course Objectives:

• Distinguish, in patients’ accounts of themselves as children, the child as an object of attention or neglect by an adult from the actual child’s subjective experience of being a center of agency in their own right.
• Describe clinically the distinction between the developmentally-based child image of inexperience and vulnerability, and more archetypal aspects of the child motif, such as images of resilience and innate wisdom.
• Explain the relation of seemingly infantile defenses of the self to the mature self that a patient sometimes defends against realizing.

John Beebe, M.D. is a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst in private practice in San Francisco. He is the author of Integrity in Depth and Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, and co-author, with Virginia Apperson, of The Presence of the Feminine in Film. A past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, John founded the Institute’s quarterly publication, now titled Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche. He has pioneered a Jungian approach to the typological and archetypal analysis of films and has published widely about film and other subjects. John is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.