Investigation of Marriage Story Film Based on Structural and Psychoanalytic Family Counseling Theories

Abstract

Cinema is an element both influenced by and affecting the society. The movie Marriage Story has also had a great impact on the audience since its release. The fact that its subject is "divorce process", which is a social reality, and the fact that the film works realistically shows a guiding feature in concretizing the techniques and methods used in family counseling. The aim of this study is to evaluate Marriage Story using the basic concepts of Salvador Minuchin's structural family counseling and Murray Bowen's psychoanalytic family counseling. For analysis, 24 scenes representing examples of psychoanalytic family counseling and structured family counseling were discussed. For the scenes covered, the basic techniques used in structural family counseling and psychodynamic family counseling were first discussed. Afterwards, it was aimed to concretize the basic concepts by matching the determined scenes with the basic concepts explained. For this purpose, the dialogues in the movie were included in the study. It has been observed that some of the scenes in the film represent the terms of both theories. In this direction, 19 scenes given in the film were examined in terms of family pathology, differentiation of the system, grouping-power-coalition concepts in Minuchin's structural family counseling. The 19 scenes in the film were examined in terms of differentiation-unification to the ego, triangle, emotional system of the nuclear family and transference between generations in Bowen's psychoanalytic approach. In the study, the use of structural family counseling and psychoanalytic family counseling on the film are exemplified. In this direction, it is thought that similar studies will be useful in teaching theory or practice.

Keywords

• film analysis
• family counseling
• salvador minuchin
• murray bowen
• marriage story