Film as an educational tool to train psychotherapists

Starting with Freud who wrote about Dostoyevsky, Michelangelo, and da Vinci, therapists have acknowledged that the humanities and arts contain great sources of insight into human nature. In this paper, I argue for the need to incorporate insights acquired by artists into the training of psychotherapists. Specifically, I present and describe a graduate-level seminar I teach that uses cinema as a tool to train mental health practitioners. Films are used to expose students to a range of universal human issues; we discuss film characters' conflicts, motivations, sources of suffering, and attempts to cope. Further efforts should be devoted to search for ways to use art to inform and enrich the practice, training, and teaching of psychotherapDirected by Robert Redford and produced in the United Statesy.