Jung, Film and Cancer: Juan Mora's La ira o Seol (Anger, also Known as Sheol).
The work of celebrated psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung is rarely associated with cures of a physiological nature, and far less with cinematic representation. Mexican filmmaker Juan Mora Catlett, though, ingeniously employs Jung in both capacities in this exploration of his own battle against cancer. Through film, Mora shares a process in which he employs several techniques of visualisation and self-hypnosis, of which those developed by Jung were the most prominent. Also of use to Mora was Jung's unlikely collaboration with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, which blazed previously unconceived trails for cooperation between the respective disciplines.
The article not only examines Mora's standpoint, particularly as regards the Jung-Pauli axis, but also investigates his use of a variety of cinematic genres and visual and thematic styles. His film is found to be a parallel to Jung's own position concerning recontextualization of the Gnostic material that, particularly in the legendary Red Book or Liber Novus, he was able to incorporate and to make relevant to a contemporary audience.
Keith Richards
