Tarsem Singh’s THE FALL (2006) explores themes of trauma, healing, storytelling as therapy, and the complex relationship between a hospitalized stuntman and a young immigrant girl in 1920s Los Angeles. The movie is an illuminating example of transference and countertransference within a dyad, and that it illustrates the interesting effect of the immutable presence of the living other in the room which leads to transformation. It also illustrates the phenomenon of “Reverie” within the shared story telling that demonstrates the useful and revealing nature of that less understood concept of reverie in analytic technique.
The film appeared on several critics’ top ten lists of the best films of 2008. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times gave the film four stars out of four and wrote, “You might want to see [it] for no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it.” He later named it among his top 20 films of 2008.
Gerard Sobnosky, LMFT, is a psychoanalyst and licensed marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles, CA. He is on the Admissions Committee and the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Committee at the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP). He teaches in NCP’s Adult Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy program and Adult Psychoanalytic Training program, for which he was named Instructor of the Year. He is a former member of the Board of Directors of the American Psychoanalytic Association and former Vice President for North America for the International Psychoanalytic Studies Organization. He enjoys participating regularly in the Mind and Film series.
Luis Vallejo, MD is a psychiatrist whose private practice Great Oak Psychiatry is based out of Beverly Hills. Beyond managing his practice of multiple clinicians in different states, he is a post seminar psychoanalytic candidate at the New Center for Psychoanalysis with interests in broadly applying psychodynamic/psychoanalytic theory to business and the arts. He has a burgeoning youtube channel called Wild Man Psychiatry and collaborates with multiple colleagues in the media industry to evolve creative dimensions of his career which are largely philanthropic in intent.
