This page was translated automatically from Turkish. Read the original

This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV0146

Interpreting David Lynch's Lost Highway as a therapeutic experience through Deleuze's time-image: mindfulness, transcendental cinema, and its potential role in medicine

INTERPRETING DAVID LYNCH’S LOST HIGHWAY THROUGH DELEUZE’S TIME-IMAGE AS A THERAPEUTIC EXPERIENCE: MINDFULNESS, TRANSCENDENTAL CINEMA, AND ITS POTENTIAL ROLE IN MEDICINE.

Lost Highway's disruption of time, narrative, and identity places the viewer in a state of interpretive suspension, and this experience can be functionally compared to the mindfulness components of observation, decentering, and tolerance of uncertainty.

The aim of this study is to examine the effects on viewers of the destabilization of time, narrative, and identity in David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997), and to ask whether interpretive suspension resembles selected aspects of mindfulness: nonreactive observation, decentering, reduced narrative automaticity, and tolerance of uncertainty. The method is a qualitative, interdisciplinary analysis of the film's narrative and temporal structure, editing, sound, and recurring motifs (Fred/Pete, Renée/Alice, videotapes, the Mystery Man, and the narrative loop). The theoretical framework combines Schrader's concept of transcendental cinema with Deleuze's concepts of the time-image, crystal-image, affect, powers of the false, and disruption of the sensory-motor schema; narrative identity, trauma, dissociation, mindfulness, phenomenology, and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) were used as complementary perspectives. As stated in the poster, no viewer assessment or clinical intervention was conducted. The findings section states that the narrative loop and the coexistence of the Fred/Pete, Renée/Alice, event/recording, and reality/memory/fantasy dualities exemplify the time-image, crystal-image, and powers of the false. The disruption of continuity limits causal prediction, attention shifts from reconstructing the plot to image, sound, time, and affect, and the viewer remains in a state of interpretive suspension. The authors suggest that tension and disorientation may reveal the viewer's need for cognitive control, and that the experience can be functionally compared to aspects of mindfulness. In conclusion, the film may have reflective and psychoeducational value in psychology, art therapy, narrative medicine, and the medical humanities, but clinical applications require empirical research.

All WCP 2026 summaries