Using Popular Movies in Psychotherapy.

• Author: HESLEY, JOHN W.

"Therapists are discovering the power of films and incorporating them into their work in growing numbers."

IN CINEMATHERAPY, psychotherapists assign films to clients--movies in which the characters or plots are similar to the clients' problems. They then discuss those films as a part of ongoing interpersonal therapy. The goal is to help clients look at their situations from a novel perspective. After all, we sometimes understand ourselves best while listening to a story about another person.

The approach owes its beginning to a clinical intervention known as bibliotherapy, a technique employed in the 1930s by psychiatrist Carl Menninger, who assigned fiction and nonfiction readings to hospitalized psychiatric patients to expand their horizons and redirect their attention. Cinematherapy is a similar intervention, but it benefits from many practical advantages that movies have when people watch TV more than they read books. The following case study is an example of how the process of integrating film assignments into conventional psychotherapy often begins. (For confidentiality, all cases have been fictionalized. Clients' identities have been disguised and circumstances have been altered.)

Beverley spoke softly, with none of the confidence that her business suit suggested: "As an attorney, I'm doing all right. I couldn't ask for a better career. But nothing else is working out. My husband and I have a distant relationship. Our teenage son is a handful. But the problem that got me here concerns my 21-year-old daughter. This child, who was always going to be a doctor, just eloped with the assistant manager of an auto shop, a man she met the day her car broke down. She's found her `soul mate,' so she's dropping out of college. Frankly, I don't know what to do or say. I don't even know how I should feel."

Beverley had grown up in the 1950s. Her mother had stayed at home, and her father had run a hardware store. She was the only college graduate in the family. After she married and had children of her own, she tried to teach them "to think for themselves, to accept no compromises, and to aim for the stars." Now, she wondered just where she had failed as a mother.

"I'd have trouble with her dropping out of school and eloping with anybody," she admitted, "but it's like she picked a person she knew I'd have the most difficulty accepting. I spent the past 21 years trying to convince my kids that education is the ticket to a quality life. I know this is her choice, not mine, but how do you keep quiet when a person you love is about to rain her chances?"

After Beverley had described the situation in more detail, we agreed on goals for therapy, one of which was to decide whose problem this was--Beverley's or her daughter's. When it was time for her to leave, I mentioned...