The dreamy imagination in the return to childhood: dream and daydream experiences in Almodovarian autofictional pain and glory

Abstract

In this brief article, I propose considerations about the cinematographic work Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria, 2019) by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, weaving a psychoanalytic perspective on autofiction, in order to bring allusions to concepts from psychoanalysis and cinema. Although the film is autofiction, this text will not have the director of the work as an analytical pretext. There will be approaches to the return to childhood, the mother and son relationship, dreams and daydreams of the character who presents his world closely linked to the past and present, in the eyes of the camera that reveal the fragility of being exposed to the public. In this way, the text proposes methodological dialogues with Sigmund Freud (1900), Ana Lucília Rodrigues and Christian Dunker (2012), Ismail Xavier (1983) and Christian Metz (1980) to elaborate theoretical concepts about dreams, daydreams, the unconscious, cinema and psychoanalysis. Let us remember that for Freud, the dream is the fulfillment of a desire and it will be through this desire that the subject will be overcome by the rediscovery of himself.