Fellini's 8 ½ and Jung: narcissism and creativity in midlife

Abstract

Fellini's 8½, released in 1963, concerns a film director who has a midlife creative block. It is here viewed within the context of Fellini's discovery of Jung's writing and Jungian analysis in 1960. In Jung he found the mirroring he had not found in his childhood, or from the Catholic Church, or from the legacy of Italian neo-realist film. The film gives expression to the mixed results of Fellini's creative use of his discovery of Jung.

Keywords:

• Fellini
• creativity
• narcissism
• mirroring
• liminality
• Bernard

Notes on contributor

Don Fredericksen is a professor film and faculty affiliate in the programs in religious studies and visual studies at Cornell University. He has written a long series of essays on Jung and film, and a Jungian monograph on Bergman's Persona (2005a). He also practices as a Jung-oriented psychotherapist. He currently serves as chairman of the Executive Committee of the International Association for Jungian Studies. He is currently writing a Jung-oriented monograph on the film Illumination by the Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi.

Notes

1. A shorter version of this essay was presented at a conference on 8½ at Harvard University in honor of the retirement of Professor Vlada Petric. An expanded version was subsequently published in Polish translation in Weglowska-Rzepa (2006). The current essay is a corrected and enlarged version of the 1980 one. For a close reading of 8½ from a classical Jungian perspective, see Conti (1972a, 1972b).