The two fields of cinema and psychoanalysis, as well as both originating in the 1890s, have much in common: the unconscious is often expressed visually, as with cinema, in fantasies and dreams; like psychoanalysis, many films explore the way time impinges on us differently, sometimes drawing us to recognise how we can have experiences that feel outside time.
The psychoanalyst and writer Andrea Sabbadini, who has died aged 75 from lymphoma, was an innovator in this relatively new interdisciplinary field, arguing that “cinema has a privileged tie to our mental activities and emotional experiences”.
Andrea wrote and edited several books on film and psychoanalysis, including The Couch and the Silver Screen (2003), Projected Shadows (2007) and Moving Images (2014). His most influential contribution to the field, however, was his founding of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival (EPFF) in 2001, which runs in alternate years at the Royal Society of Medicine, having previously been hosted by Bafta. Invited experts including actors and directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Juliet Stevenson, Michael Apted and Ken Loach, as well as academics, film theorists and critics, would discuss their ideas and work in panels with psychoanalysts.
Andrea’s presentation of the Walter Salles film Behind the Sun, based on the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare’s Broken April, was particularly memorable, with its scene of oxen threshing grain by walking in circles, a vivid metaphor in the context of ritualised revenge for Sigmund Freud’s notion of repetition compulsion.
He did not think in terms of “patients”, but people with different responses to what life had thrown at them
The festival had its beginnings in the mid 1990s, in a series of Sunday morning film screenings and discussions initiated by Andrea in collaboration with Peter Evans, professor of film studies at Queen Mary University of London. These were held initially at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, then at the ICA in central London. Films such as Michael Powell’s psychological horror Peeping Tom (1960) and Nineteen Nineteen (1984), about, in the director Hugh Brody’s own words, history, memory and psychoanalysis, were shown and discussed with the audience, in a creative and inclusive forum warmly hosted by Andrea.
Andrea had also been part of a pioneering enterprise in psychoanalytic practice. For two years after their marriage in 1974, he and his wife, Laura (nee Forti), worked and lived together as resident therapists at the Arbours Crisis Centre in London, which functioned according to lines advocated by the controversial psychoanalyst RD Laing: those receiving this help and living there were not thought of as “patients” but as people with different responses to what life had thrown at them – Laing believed that “insanity is a rational adjustment to an insane world”. Andrea maintained his links with Arbours throughout his life.
In 2014 he published Boundaries and Bridges, a collection of papers, many written much earlier, on psychoanalysis and its clinical practice. There he addressed the struggle to integrate states of mind that are in tension with or split-off from each other – for instance, the sense of timelessness (“temporal infantile omnipresence”) with the constant flux of experiences involving objective clock-time – an ongoing fascination. The book raised philosophical questions too. In his review, the psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar recognised “a mind that is not only sophisticated in psychoanalytic theory but also firmly steeped in arts, humanities, cinema, music and culture more generally”.
Andrea was always in favour of “both and” rather than “either or”: he argued that we need, between people and within ourselves, firm boundaries and welcoming bridges. He was independent in the broad sense – willing to differ, politely, from collective group convictions, for instance in his opinion about a film. He was also independent in his dislike of analytic tribalism and tribes, refusing to identify himself with any of the three predominant groups in British psychoanalysis – classical Freudian, Independent or Kleinian.
Through my years on the EPFF committee (2000-04), I saw what a fine leader Andrea was, both “general and foot soldier”, as a fellow analyst described him. He created a lively, Italian-style family – despite having lived in England for 50 years, he was unmistakeably Italian and European.
Photograph: Amazon
Born in Milan to a bourgeois family of Jewish origin, Andrea was the son of Flora (nee Ancona) and Emilio Sabbadini, an accountant, who had married in Switzerland while fleeing fascist Italy during the second world war.
He went to school at the Liceo Classico Parini in Milan, then attended Milan University, where he graduated in philosophy and psychology in 1972, and where he met Laura. In his early 20s he wrote film reviews for the Italian daily newspaper Avanti! before moving to London in 1975.
He and I were in the same training cohort at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Maida Vale, west London, from 1981, with Andrea striking me even then as an achiever, and we became close family friends. He qualified in 1985.
As well as EPFF, Andrea was instrumental in setting up similar festivals in Romania, Bulgaria and Germany. He became a member of many committees, at the institute and elsewhere – as director of training at Arbours, trustee of the Freud Museum, and as honorary senior lecturer at University College London. He was the founding editor of the journal Psychoanalysis and History (1999-2004), and for many years was the film review editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Andrea valued discipline as much as freedom and imagination. He loved film with all its wildness and dream-like capacity, and criticism with its aims of clarity and comprehensiveness. And being a psychoanalyst was never just a job, but central to who he was.
A handsome and athletic man, Andrea enjoyed skiing and hiking, especially in the Dolomites, football (he supported Inter Milan), and music, especially opera; he sang bass in three choirs.
He is survived by Laura, their daughter, Marta, and two sons, Tommaso and Lorenzo, and by five grandchildren, Leo, Samuel, Marlo, Remy and Anna.
Andrea Sabbadini, psychoanalyst, writer and festival director, born 27 February 1950; died 11 July 2025