Tuesday, July 30, 2019 at 7pm
Jennifer Reeves's Three Projectors for Three Approaches to Psychotherapy

155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn

Jennifer Reeves has long experimented with the formal possibilities of cinema as a way to explore the psychiatric institutions and ideas that have shaped our contemporary understanding of the self, from her 1996 film Chronic, which probes the turbulent inner life of a punk teenager in and out of a mental hospital, to her 2004 feature The Time We Killed, centering on the reveries of an agoraphobic Manhattanite in the days following 9/11.

At Light Industry she will debut a new multi-projector performance, Three Projectors for Three Approaches to Psychotherapy, which takes as its core material a 16mm print of the influential 1965 teaching film Three Approaches to Psychotherapy. “Throughout the 1950s and 1960s,” Reeves explains, “new and radically different theories of psychotherapy were simultaneously growing in prominence. Publications, conferences, and training programs detailed the conceptual basis and techniques of the different practices, but how did these groundbreaking theorists speak and interact with their patients in a real session? The feature-length Three Approaches to Psychotherapy was meant to demonstrate the answer to that question.”

Produced by therapist Everett Shostrom (later author of the popular title Man the Manipulator), Three Approaches documents the treatment undertaken by Gloria Szymanski, a 31-year-old divorcee and single mother. She meets with Albert Ellis, founder of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy; Fritz Perls, pioneer of Gestalt therapy; and Carl Rogers, a progenitor of the humanistic, or person-centered, school. “Gloria,” Reeves continues, “a person who came of age well before the women’s liberation movement, consults each therapist in earnest and discovers herself in profoundly different conversations and dynamics with these men. An actual patient allowed herself to be filmed while engaged in therapy with three different doctors, distinguished by their divergent orientations but sharing their therapeutic endeavors.”

Tickets - $8, available at door.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm.