Film as Mythobiography: Federico Fellini, Ernst Bernhard and the Great Mother Complex in La dolce vita and 8 1/2

This article studies the representations of gender and gender relationships in La dolce vita and 8½ through the lens of the influence exerted on Fellini by the Jungian psychoanalyst Ernst Bernhard in the early 1960s. A brief summary of Bernhard’s Mitobiografia, especially the short essay “Il complesso della grande madre,” and remarks on the biographical circumstances of Fellini’s encounter with Bernhard will suggest that a comparison between Fellini and Bernhard could provide a fruitful complement to the existing scholarship on Fellini and Jung. A close back-to-back analysis of the aforementioned films – the first released immediately before and the second immediately after the start of Fellini’s analysis with Bernhard – will then show the great importance not only of the implementation in 8½ of specific Jungian concepts, but of Fellini’s more general attempt to translate Bernhard’s conception of psychoanalysis as “mythobiography” into (meta)cinematic terms.