Filming disorganized attachment

There are many points of contact between film and psychology. Across the decades, scholars have made film the object of psychological analysis,1 while psychiatrists and psychologists pervade cinema and television, from Alfred Kinsey to Hannibal Lecter.2 Early documentary films addressing psychology include Glub Glub and the Monkeys (Robert Allen, 1975), about the research of Robert and Joan Hinde on infant development in primates. More recent works in this genre are, among others, The Human Behavior Experiments (Alex Gibney, 2006), about the Milgram and Zimbardo obedience experiments, and The Dark Matter of Love (Sarah McCarthy, 2013), about the family relationships of adopted children who had previously received care in institutions. Yet despite these engagements between psychology and film, the vast archive of film footage produced by psychological science has been almost entirely neglected as an object of film studies scholarship. It is true that there has been some commentary on the use of film in science:3 in terms specifically of psychological science, Emma Wilson has offered a brief but beautiful analysis of Alain Resnais’s use of footage from evolutionary psychology in Mon oncle d’Amérique,4 while Lisa Cartwright has studied the films made by René Spitz of infants in institutional care and the role played by these films in scaffolding calls for reform in care arrangements for children.5 Apart from these exceptions, however, psychological footage itself has not to date been subject to the tools of film theory. Similarly no attention has been paid to the rich and intriguing methodological discussions about film within the psychological literature itself: regarding the advantages of using silent film as stimulus material to assess children’s attributions about the beliefs and desires of others, for instance, or of using film as a stimulus in neuroimaging research when a subject is unable to move their head.6 The absence of attention to these fields is at odds with a growing trend in wider humanities scholarship, in which critics are starting to engage in meaningful dialogue and contention with the sciences rather than tacitly complying with the doctrine of the two inhabiting ‘separate spheres’.7 In paying close attention to