Introduction: (Re-)mediating the Unconscious

This introduction maps the historical, theoretical, and conceptual terrain for rethinking the relationship between media and the unconscious. From early cinema’s fascination with hypnosis to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “optical unconscious” and the psychoanalytic frameworks of the 1970s, film theory has long addressed how unconscious processes shape spectatorship. The cognitive turn of the late 1980s reframed prereflectivity as automatic perceptual and affective mechanisms, while contemporary 4E models of cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) further emphasize film experience as relational, sensorimotor, and prereflective. Drawing on phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, and neuroscience, the introduction proposes a dynamic and spatial understanding of the unconscious as continuous with conscious life, rather than a hidden domain of repressed content. This perspective highlights the role of media as cultural-technological mediators of unconscious processes, from habits and affects to altered states of consciousness. By foregrounding mediation, the volume positions the unconscious as neither ineffable nor inaccessible but as expressed through embodied, imaginative, and affective inscriptions in cinematic and post-screen media. In this light, “re-mediating the unconscious” signifies both revisiting classical frameworks and recognizing how new media ecologies continually reshape unconscious experience, calling for relational, interdisciplinary, and processual approaches at the intersection of film theory, psychology, and neuroscience.