The Double Life of Veronique, written and directed by Kryzysztof Kieslowski, is a film bathed in a subtle ether of the uncanny, none more haunting than the twinning likenesses of the protagonist(s), the Polish Veronica and the French Veronique. Veronica, a luminous young woman with an ethereal singing voice, who seems to inhabit a separate sphere, sees her double, or Lacanian semblant perhaps, boarding a bus in Krakow. A shimmer in the argent web of space and time reveals the schoolteacher Veronique, also a singer, in Paris attending a marionette performance with her students. She sees the puppeteer Alexandre’s reflection in a mirror. He’s familiar, her amorous double perhaps in a more prosaic minor chord, to whom she reveals that she’s always felt she exists in two places. As Veronica dies onstage of cardiac failure mid-performance, a similar sensation simultaneously pierces Veronique, and she abandons her singing career, but not the connection to her now doubly spectral twin.

Learning Objectives

As a result of attending this course, participants should be able to:

• Explore Lacan’s proposition that self-identity is impossible, and that singularity and oneness are always split
• Discuss dissociative fantasy as a screen for transgression, or more importantly as a screen for hidden rupture and self-duplicity

Albert Morell, PhD, is a Lacanian clinical and research psychoanalyst in private and institutional practice. He is a former university lecturer in literature, philosophy, and film studies, as well as a former screenwriter. He is co-editor of The Los Angeles County Psychologist, and is founder and delegate of the California Forum of the Internationale des Forums École de Psychoanalyse des Forums du Champ Lacanien (IF-EPFCL), based in Paris, France.

Apurva Shah, MD, is a child and adolescent psychiatrist working for Kaiser Permanente in Palmdale. An Associate member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis, he is the co-coordinator of the Film and Mind Series. He is also the Founding Director and Faculty at the Antarnad Foundation, a not-for-profit psychoanalytic psychotherapy training program, in Ahmedabad, India.  His primary interest, and the focus of  most of his publications, in the interface of psychoanalysis and culture.

Pricing & CE Credits

• $20 with 2.5 CE Credits
• $10 without CE Credit