Educating to Helping Relationships: An Innovative Approach with the use of Movies.

Screened fiction stir people’s psyches through emotion and its equilibrium-disturbing power (Izod, 2000). Watching a movie projects the viewer into a condition allowing identification with movie characters (Wedding & Boyd, 1997), and may “touch” people on an emotional level rather than an intellectual one (Mangin, 1999). Moreover, since the emotions aroused by cinema refer to a virtual world, they may help the individual grow in self-awareness while feeling relatively “safe” (Izod, 2000; Powell, Newgent & Lee, 2006). The theory and practice of cinematherapy describe how the features of cinema may be helpful from a therapeutic point of view; moreover, we believe that movies can be precious, as well, as far as education and training for helping relationships are concerned. The specificity of education and training for helping relationships require specific teaching/learning approaches. Bion stated that only limited methods exist to communicate emotional experiences, while technical issues are easy to share and teach. Moreover, he believed that in the field of emotional experience, a mimetic approach to learning may be dangerous because it might resemble a spurious growth and education (Bion, 1948). Therefore, in the field of emotional experience, education and training should follow a pathway which is different from the one typical for communication and acquisition of technical skills. Eugenio Torre (one of the authors) developed an innovative method which, through art, proposes a pathway for teaching and educating about psychotherapy and helping relationships (Torre, 2000, 2002, 2008, 2010). The theoretical background is rooted in Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology and in existentialism (with sparks from Heidegger and Sartre). This theoretical background is integrated with technical issues and with the experience of working in a group, and specifically uses dynamic images (full length movies or scenes) from cinematic fiction as educational incitements. Participants’ reflection on movie characters and on the images emerging from the group is stimulated, while the group leader supports and facilitates the integration of contents into emotional experience.