Updates

2022

This year the Freud Museum in London is hosting an online workshop devoted to Presenting Problems!  Please join us for what looks to be a good conversation about the representation of internal life, the mutative factors in psychological change and how psychoanalytic concepts can help illuminate some of the paradoxical aspects of these films. Hope to see you all there!

https://www.freud.org.uk/event/online-workshop-presenting-problems-in-therapy/

All attendees will be sent a unique link to join the live event and the recording 24 hours after the event, available for 1 month. It will take place from 4-6.30pm British Summer Time. Please check the time difference if you are not in the same time zone as UK.

“Presenting Problems” is a series of short films that address dilemmas faced by both patients and psychotherapists. The films do this not by portraying people with particular symptoms (depression, anxiety, etc.) or by illustrating diagnostic categories (masochism, narcissism and so on) but by using some unconventional figures within more conventional genres (children’s story, the myth/legend, gothic horror, a “thought-story”) as a way of describing something about an internal dynamic.

The films employ different visual idioms, literary forms, and types of media to convey the conditions upon which this particular world is felt operate. Each film could be seen simultaneously as a case study, a philosophical inquiry, a description of primitive states and a portrayal of an internal “situation” (among other things).

Taking the films as a point of departure, this workshop will open discussion within the group and raise questions about what facilitates, stalls, or prevents psychological change. They have been used for classroom discussions, clinical training, and for anyone else interested in such things.

The films were all made by psychoanalyst Garrick Duckler, who will also facilitate the workshop discussion.

2018-9

Showings this year include Reed College, Boathouse Microcinema and the Jung Institute. If you aren’t familiar with it, Boathouse Microcinema is a screening series of local filmmakers in Portland, OR run by Amy Epperson, Chris Freeman and Shannon Neale.  These are some very special, driven, creative, interesting people. So please check out more screenings, which take place at The Boathouse, a long-running art studio space and former fireboat station on the banks of the Willamette River.

Across Culture and Countries

A special thank you to Andres Berrios who was kind enough (voluntarily) to translate the film “On Being a Patient” into Spanish for our viewers. Andres also helped with the Spanish translation of The Safe and The Eskimo. Please contact us for these translations.

If you haven’t had a chance to see “On Being a Patient,” it is on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQRWRPpbjBs&t=25s and has already surpassed 25K views.

Also, although fairly old news now but still worth mentioning. The Presenting Problems collection is for the first time being translated into Greek and will be used in classes at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki.  It is with great excitement that we are able to announce the release of the films for non-English speaking audiences. Please inquire for other translations that can be made available.

Here is a link to a brief article on the films and their debt to the software program Studio Artist and the wonderful crew there that have been such a great help. Thanks John and everyone else at SA, very happy to be using your wonderful program that can open up so many doors for creative expression.

www.synthetik-studioartist.com/2011/04/presenting-problems.html