Marianne Chouchan
Psycho-screenplayer for screenplay.
Must
we follow the fashion and put psychoanalysis everywhere, like French cooking
goes into all meals ?
Had the doctor Freud, his
disciple Jacques Lacan, and their numerous followers so contaminated our world
that we could not live without introspection ? Of course not ! but
unconscious does exist and we all have experienced it, sometimes without
knowing it, in the path of our affective or professionnal life, in our familial
relationsﾉWe often repeat the same stories, the same meetings, even the same
failures, again and again, without knowing why.
Psychoanalysis
and fiction.
Fiction characters are not out of this statement.
They have a story, written by an author but they also have their own life,
suggested by the writing and not bound to have been thought in the beginning.
How can it happen ? Well, because a screenplayer doesnﾕt control his
unconscious. He invents his characters from life, from different people he goes
with or of whom he has heard, for example. He doesnﾕt search to explain the
meaning of the behaviours that he can imagine – he hasnﾕt to do that
– for he neednﾕt this to make his stories work.
It happens sometimes, even quite often that he
chooses an end which is not coherent with what the character psychology is,
because he want to prove one thing or make the plot go on : master of his
puppets, he hasnﾕt felt them
enough. For he knows how to tell a story but cannot understand all the keys of
psychology.
The psycho-screenplayer intervention.
It is precisely then that a psychoanalysis
specialist can intervene : her point is not to place the character
psychosis or neurosis at the center of the story, but, with the help of her
theoritical and clinical knowledge, the psycho-screenplayer will see what is
plausible and what is not. Her ﾇ diagnosis ﾈ will go, thanks to her
experience of writing and shooting, with propositions which can be rephrased by
the screenplayer.
The first task consists in detecting
what is told in the screenplay beyond the words. Then, it imports to elaborate
a past for each characters, their ﾇ protostory ﾈ, their childhood,
their adolescence or the events which have led them to the situation in which
we see them at the beginning of the movie : the public wonﾕt know directly
this past, but the screenplayer, the director and even the actor will use it to
improve their character. Even the wardrobe master and the set designer may need
it to make their work more coherent.
Intervene
before the writing.
The psycho-screenplayer can also
intervene before the writing, when the screenplayer team prepares its project,
its characters and its plot.
Marianne Chouchan / October 2004