More outside than inside. A note on the movie Inside Out

Journal title PSICOTERAPIA E SCIENZE UMANE
Author/s Antonella Mancini
Publishing Year 2016 Issue 2016/1 Language Italian
Pages 8 P. 103-110 File size 41 KB
DOI 10.3280/PU2016-001006
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The 2015 movie Inside Out, directed by Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen, has the declared intention of educating and promoting knowledge on emotions in a world where inner life seems lost or devalued. However, a closer analysis shows that this movies ends up promoting an opposite goal, namely it supports a narrower cognitive psychology, rather than dynamic psychology, and the psychotropic drug culture that today is so widespread. The complexity of mental life, with its dialectics between inner and outer worlds, is strongly reduced by didactic aims. "Positive thinking" (with the related imperative "You must be happy") becomes the pedagogical goal to be pursued, which de-emphasizes inner conflicts (reduced to traumas or stress), and emphasizes adherence to conformity, elimination of critical thought and renunciation of subjectivity. The paradox is that the more subjectivity and inner life are celebrated, the more they are reduced.

Keywords: Inside Out, emotions, inner life, subjectivity, "positive thinking"

Antonella Mancini, Più fuori che dentro. Note in margine al film Inside Out in "PSICOTERAPIA E SCIENZE UMANE" 1/2016, pp 103-110, DOI: 10.3280/PU2016-001006