Bion and Transcendental-Slow Cinema: Toward a Psychoanalytic Cinema-Viewing Practice.

Filmmaker Paul Schrader (2018) defined Transcendental-Slow Cinema as a style that seeks to convey an ineffable experience using the formal qualities of cinema. The filmmaking techniques employed create a frustrating, withholding experience for the viewer, a cinema journey that is far from mainstream entertainment movie-viewing. This experience maps onto Bion's theory of thinking and growth and its relationship to frustration, as well as his further development and complication of those ideas in his work on transformations and O. It is recommended that by enduring the experience of these films, a psychoanalyst, or trainee, can practice Bion's recommendations for analytic attention-a state denuded of memory, desire, and understanding necessary for apprehension of a session's ultimate emotional reality, O.