: Considers how creative practice functions as a mode of psychological integration and asks what cinema might reveal about the workings of the unconscious.
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This essay explores the formal relationship between filmmaking and psychoanalysis through creative nonfiction and psychoanalytic theory. Moving between conversation with psychoanalytic psychotherapist Kendra Terry, Ph.D and reflections on the author's own filmmaking practice, the essay proposes cinema as a process of free association, dreaming, and collaborative meaning-making rather than simply an object of psychoanalytic interpretation. Drawing on Freud, Lacan, James Fosshage, Wilfred Bion, and Thomas Ogden, it argues that filmmaking and psychoanalysis share methods for approaching subjectivity, organizing unconscious experience, and generating meaning through form. Situated between artist writing and psychoanalytic inquiry, the essay considers how creative practice functions as a mode of psychological integration and asks what cinema might reveal about the workings of the unconscious.