L’incursion de l’onf dans la thérapie psychiatrique : genèse, réalisation et pérennité de la série Mental Mechanisms

Abstract

The Mental Mechanisms series, produced by the National Film Board of Canada at the end of the 1940s, came to be at a particularly effervescent conjuncture in Canadian psychiatry: its institutional opening to research, teaching, and clinical work. Born in large part thanks to the desire of psychiatrists to introduce first still and then moving images to their experiments in group therapy, it quickly found a “big audience” via the NFB’s circuits of community distribution. It was first a therapeutic, but then became an educational, training, prevention, and public health tool. If historical studies of the NFB’s productions have basically brought to the fore the series’ “community life,” this bit of large-scale distribution so important to the NFB of the period, the series nevertheless continues to have a kind of “therapeutic existence.” By returning to the NFB archives, this article discusses the series’ initial, basically therapeutic raisons d’être in the context of its emergence as a therapeutic application in psychiatry. The article also seeks to place the series in its own specific context: within a history of therapeutic projection.