Oedipus again: a critical study of Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter.
In this paper the Oedipus complex is reexamined through a film, The Night of the Hunter. Study reveals a concealed fairy tale structure, a structure that, when presented against a mythic backdrop, is ideal for presenting a certain kind of oedipal situation, that of a vulnerable damaged father and couple (indeed, couples), revealing a skewed oedipal situation. The film, produced in 1954 and looked at forty years later in the context of psychoanalytic writings of the last decade (Bergmann, Feldman, Herman, Simon), provides a matrix with which to reexamine a fundamental psychoanalytic concept, the Oedipus complex. It is the mutual enrichment of art and psychoanalysis that this paper addresses.
Bauer
S F
SF
D004324:Drama; D005260:Female; D005495:Folklore; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D009813:Oedipus Complex