Dreams of Pleasure

The analysts featured in this documentary contend that psychoanalysis has a long history as a progressive movement devoted to the common good. Psychoanalysis asks us to examine the processes of self deception that perpetuate both individual unhappiness and social structures that are inequitable and oppressive. Yet psychoanalytic education has for the most part focused on training and treating the relatively privileged. The Black psychoanalysts here examine this dilemma and engage in a vibrant and thought provoking discussion about race, culture, class and the unrealized promise of psychoanalysis.

Novelist Catherine Tramell is once again in trouble with the law, and Scotland Yard appoints psychiatrist Dr. Michael Glass to evaluate her. Though, like Detective Nick Curran before him, Glass is entranced by Tramell and lured into a seductive game.

A psychoanalyst helps a patient to achieve his ambitions.

Michel, a psycho-analyst, falls asleep while listening to his patient Olga, a kleptomaniac and a sexual pervert, tell him how she likes her husband beating her. When he wakes up, he finds Olga having been choked to death. He now has to deal with a body, with Olga's rich husband who thinks she stole money from him, and with all his patients' insanity that haunts him.

A group of patients converges in Paris following the demise of their renowned American psychoanalyst, unveiling profound bonds as they reminisce about the late therapist's deep influence on their lives.

"Cilantro y perejil" is a comedy about couples from the same family, hit by the economic crisis in Mexico. The plot turns around the eternal question of whether it is worth it to live as a couple. The conclusions are fun, unpredictable and very human. After ending a ten-year marriage, Carlos and Susana try to fall in love with other people without success. As the days go by, Carlos realizes that without Susana he is unable to do many things, including distinguishing cilantro from parsley.

A psychoanalyst, newly arrived in a very superstitious village, encounters absurd events.

Mariano is a psychologist who must fulfill community service after losing a lawsuit by a traffic accident. He is forced to provide therapeutic support to Alfredo, a policeman depressed over his wife cheating on him. Mariano is then accidentally involved in a double homicide investigation being conducted by Alfredo.

Ryder is a psychiatrist who can flawlessly analyze his clients' problems, but is hopelessly alone in solving his own mental distress. One day, Sleuth, a detective, bursts into Ryder's office with the news that Ryder is suspected of murdering three women. Ryder is unaware of any wrongdoing. However, he has received a mysterious letter announcing a murder, and Lizzy, his secretary, has disappeared without a trace. The confessions of a new patient set Ryder thinking. A verbal cat-and-mouse game ensues between Ryder and Sleuth, but it raises more questions than it answers. If the murders have been committed, what is the motive? And if there is no motive, can there be a suspect? Or has everything been staged? Perhaps by Sleuth or Ryder himself?

Accused of dealing in counterfeit, Paul entrusts his daughter Brigitte to the care of a friend, Jean Clary. The girl, a walking catastrophe, finally wins Jean's heart. They unmask the forgers, clearing Paul's name and can now concentrate on their love.

A burnt-out New York psychoanalyst exchanges apartments with a Parisian woman. When his patients arrive, they talk to her and then pay. He returns early and becomes a patient as well.

A psychoanalyst learns to have an illness and as a consequence he decides to quit his job. All his patients get together to find a way to make him feel better.

A happily married woman sees a psychoanalyst and develops doubts about her husband.

Arthur Turner's bored housewife Mildred seeks psychiatric help from Dr. Alan Coles who also has his own emotional problems to solve.

Resonating Surfaces is triple portrait, of a city, a woman and an attitude to life. For the personal story of Suely Rolnik, who is a Brazilian psychoanalyst currently living in São Paulo, involves the Brazilian dictatorship of the sixties as well as the Parisian intellectual climate surrounding Deleuze and Guattari in the seventies. The film is woven through by different themes: the other and the relation to otherness, the connection between body and power, the voice and, ultimately, the micropolitics of desire and of resistance.

An intimate conversation between Félix Guattari and psychiatrist Danielle Sivadon.

In 1950 Jerome Hill went to Zurich with the intention of making a film about Dr. Carl G. Jung. The project was abandoned when Hill decided that Jung was not a good subject. After Hill's death, Jonas Mekas edited the film which focuses on Dr. Jung as a person.

For the first time, filmed by psychoanalyst Gérard Miller, famous and ordinary patients speak in a documentary about their “first session” of analysis—the one that sets the course for a personal journey that may last for years. Among them are Jacques Weber, Charles Berling, Marc-Olivier Fogiel, Marie Darrieussecq, and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy—who is the only wife of a sitting head of state to speak candidly about why and how she has been in analysis for the past eight years. But why did all these “analysands” go to see a psychoanalyst? What happened during their first session? Why did they continue? And why did some, like Karl Lagerfeld or Claude Chabrol, become critics of Freudian theory? The inside of the consulting room, where everyone dreams of being a fly on the wall and hearing what is said, but also… everything that goes on around, before, and after.

After the Second World War, Claude, son of communist resistance fighters, whose mother died in Auschwitz, and Ben, child of a prostitute and a Jew, face the demons that haunt them with the help of Françoise Dolto.

Todd is a hyper-articulate, obsessive compulsive gay twentysomething whose fear of dying alone leads him to a baffling conclusion: he might not be gay after all. When he meets Rory, a whip-smart struggling actress with her own set of insecurities, the two forge a relationship that’s all talk and no sex.