Kargman's short film captures all that has been wrong with certain corners of the therapy field for quite some time. Anyone familiar with Mark Pendergrast's "Victims of Memory" will find themselves smiling knowingly as the repressed-memory literature features in close-ups. This film takes us from the first session where garden-variety personal issues are the focus, and lets us watch the client's agenda is hijacked by the political, rather than the scientific, agenda of the therapist.
Right to the last moment, the memories are compelling, but none more so than the last, where "Daddy has to stick it in." And that is where the grain of truth is visible without the grotesque, distorting magnifying glass that the therapist has held over it for 19 sessions. As a lecturer in psychology, rest assured that this short will be required viewing for my counselling and therapy students as a cautionary tale. I urge others to do the same.
Cinematically, the acting is of a sterling quality. In the background, Kargman's camera and editing style captures brilliantly the flashes of memory that string themselves together into what has all the hallmarks of a confabulation. He is not merely borrowing an NYPD-Blue style of camera-work, rather he is underlining the tenuousness of those recollections that make us who they are, that hold a "narrative truth" that is compelling, even when it is built out of fragments that have no "historical truth." A film for film studies and law majors as much as psychology majors, it brings home some serious reflections on the state of therapy today, through an examination of a therapist who, by the few moments just before the credits we can imagine will soon be on the receiving end of Kargman's more litigious skills.
Right to the last moment, the memories are compelling, but none more so than the last, where "Daddy has to stick it in." And that is where the grain of truth is visible without the grotesque, distorting magnifying glass that the therapist has held over it for 19 sessions. As a lecturer in psychology, rest assured that this short will be required viewing for my counselling and therapy students as a cautionary tale. I urge others to do the same.
Cinematically, the acting is of a sterling quality. In the background, Kargman's camera and editing style captures brilliantly the flashes of memory that string themselves together into what has all the hallmarks of a confabulation. He is not merely borrowing an NYPD-Blue style of camera-work, rather he is underlining the tenuousness of those recollections that make us who they are, that hold a "narrative truth" that is compelling, even when it is built out of fragments that have no "historical truth." A film for film studies and law majors as much as psychology majors, it brings home some serious reflections on the state of therapy today, through an examination of a therapist who, by the few moments just before the credits we can imagine will soon be on the receiving end of Kargman's more litigious skills.
