Top 20 Psychological Movies of All Time

Psychological movies are not all about pscyhotic individuals and psychologists, nor are they all thrillers. Some psychological movies portray hope and the triumph of human resilience; however, few film-goers would deny that Alfred Hitchock was the king of psychological film, and his films portray both darkness and possible redemption. The following top psychological movies of all time are just a sampling of some of the greatest psychological films produced by Hollywood (and elsewhere).

The movies are listed in order of release to show the vast difference in earlier movie portrayals of psychological issues and current perspectives on the same.

1.) MockingbirdTo Kill a Mockingbird (1962): Heroes and exemplars abound in this epic film about a white attorney in the Depression-era South, who defends a Black man accused of rape. Based upon Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, this film serves as a historical note about prejudice and social inequality.

2.) In Cold Blood (1967): Nominated for four Oscars, this film was based upon the book of the same name, penned by Truman Capote. The film goes into the lives of two men on trial for killing the Clutter family in Kansas. Some scenes were filmed on the locations of the original events, in Garden City and Holcomb, Kansas including the Clutter residence. In 2008, In Cold Blood was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

3.) One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975): Look at this movie as an historic (yet satirical) venture into the barbaric and controlling treatment of patients at a psychiatric hospital during the mid-twentieth century. This film, which stars Jack Nicholson, remains as fresh and shocking as when it was released.

4.) Taxi DriverTaxi Driver (1976): Directed by Martin Scorsese, this is a gritty, disturbing, nightmarish modern film classic that examines alienation in urban society. It explores the psychological madness within an obsessed, twisted, inarticulate, lonely, anti-hero cab driver and war vet (De Niro). Jodi Foster, who also starred in Silence of the Lambs (see below), was required to undergo psychological tests to see if she would bear up during filming.

5.) The Breakfast Club (1985): The Breakfast Club is a 1985 teen film widely considered a definitive work in the genre. A timeless film that takes on teen issues and group dynamics. As late as 2008, the film was selected by Empire magazine as one of The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time.

6.) Fatal Attraction (1987): This movie struck so many chords that the term, “fatal attraction,” came to mean “murderous obsession.” Fatal Attraction spawned numerous other movies about middle-class families besieged by a lone psychotic intent on infiltrating and destroying the fabric of the family unit, including The Stepfather (1987), Pacific Heights (1990), The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992), and Fear (1996).

7.) Silence of the Lambs (1991): An intelligent psychiatrist turned psychopath Hannibal Lecter (portrayed by British actor Anthony Hopkins) brought a major commercial and critical success to this film. This film remains so disturbing that it was rumored that co-star Jodi Foster refused to participate in the sequel. The film was a five-time major Academy-Award winner.

8.) The Prince of Tides (1991): A troubled man talks to his suicidal sister’s psychiatrist about their family history and falls in love with her in the process. A great portrayal of transference, as well as a taste of southern life. Although not as critically acclaimed as the novel by the same name, the movie was a box-office hit and was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

9.) The Fisher King (1991): This movie script follows a path that is as convoluted as the personalities who fill that script’s roles. The film tackles homelessness, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PSTD), depression, manic flights, romance and a Holy Grail.

10.) Shawshank RedemptionThe Shawshank Redemption (1994): One of the most popular films ever made, perhaps due to the ease an individual can relate to the story of a man wrongfully imprisoned but never giving up hope. A great film to recommend as a treatment adjunct.

11.) As Good As It Gets (1997): Ever wonder how obssesive compulsive disorder affects some relationships? This movie, starring Jack Nicholson, tries to improve his behavior to impress a single mom (Helen Hunt) with a chronically asthmatic young son.

12.) American Beauty (1999): A depressed suburban father in a mid-life crisis decides to turn his hectic life around after developing an infatuation for his daughter’s attractive friend. A great script centers this Oscar-winning film about mindfulness, finding beauty in each moment, and the possibility that each individual holds for change.

13.) Analyze This (1999): Released just eight years after The Prince of Tides (see below), this movie shows the shift that the public took on analysts and psychologists. More of a pop culture film, Billy Crystal plays a psychologist to Robert Deniro’s gangster client character, creating less drama and more comedy.

14.) Memento (2000): A man who suffers from retrograde amnesia uses notes and tattoos to hunt for the man he thinks killed his wife. This movie was an art-house noir made for $5 million and released by a novice distributor after no other company would touch it. After approximately months in release, the film even entered the list of top 10 highest-grossing films.

15.) A Beautiful Mind (2001): Based upon the true story of John Forbes Nash, Jr. and his struggle with schizophrenia, this film pulls audiences into Nash’s harrowing journey. The film also is a note to triumph, as Nash receives a Nobel Prize later in life for his mathematical discoveries.

16.) Donnie DarkoDonnie Darko (2001): This surrealist psychological thriller film depicts the reality-bending adventures of the title character as he seeks the meaning and significance behind his troubling Doomsday-related visions. Despite its poor box office showing, the film began to attract a devoted fan base. Additionally, the film received widespread critical acclaim.

17.) Iris (2001): This film is based upon John Bayley’s memoir of his wife, Irish Murdoch, and is a portrayal of Alzheimer’s Disease. Jim Broadbent won an Oscar for his portrayal of John Bayley.

18.) The Ted Bundy Story: Antisocial personality disorder personified in a killer who stalked and killed at least 30 women during the 1970s and 1980s. Sadistic and sociopathic, Bundy holds many of the disorders and personality traits that forensic police now use to profile other serial killers. In real life, Bundy underwent multiple psychiatric examinations and his diagnosis changed frequently.

19.) Capturing the Friedmans (2003): This documentary film focuses on the 1980s investigation of Arnold and Jesse Friedman for child molestation. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 2003. Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Jarecki so recognizes the archetypal figures in the Friedman home that he knows to push things any further through heavy-handed assessment would be redundant.”

20.) Running with Scissors (2006): The son of an alcoholic father and an unstable mother, Augusten Burroughs is handed off to his mother’s therapist, Dr. Finch, and spends his adolescent years as a member of Finch’s bizarre extended family. A comedy-drama film, this is one of a few films based upon an actual memoir.

Have you ever seen a movie titled "Lie to Me" ? If so, you must be familiar with the name of 'Dr. Cal Lightman' mustn't you ?
He knows when a person do lie just by looked their face, how's the story ?
Here, I give the synopsis :)

In Lie to Me, Tim Roth plays Dr. Cal Lightman, a scientist specializing in decoding facial expressions and body language.
He's bursting with fun facts, asserting that there are, on average,
"three lies per 10 minutes of conversation." Like Monk and Psych and The Mentalist, Lie offers us an eccentric who's brought in by law enforcement to solve crimes. He's got a British accent, so we know he's intelligent and a bit dotty.
And he's got an attractive female associate (The Practice's Kelli Williams) who's also full of fun facts: "In a fake smile, there's no eye-wrinkling."

Naturally, Dr. Lightman encounters skeptics who call him a "carnival act", just as naturally, he proves them wrong.
Lie to Me is derivative yet well crafted, predictable yet ever-so-slightly novel (all those new fun facts!), so it's no wonder that Fox thinks it's got itself a potential hit worthy of post–American Idol time-period status.

Historical Writings on Parapsychology and Its Contributions to Psychology

The modern historiography of clinical psychology and psychiatry was deeply affected by Henri F. Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970). Not only did Ellenberger provide a detailed discussion of ideas of the unconscious that was unprecedented, as seen in the work of Sigmund Freud, Pierre Janet, and Carl G. Jung, among others, but he also argued that interest in parapsychological phenomena and spiritism was an important contributing factor to the development of ideas of the mind. Ellenberger credited the early mesmerists with observations of phenomena that occurred during the mesmeric trance such as secondary personalities and state specific memory, phenomena which supported the idea of non-conscious levels or layers of the mind. Furthermore, in this context Ellenberger mentioned interest in such phenomena as table turning and mediumship. He was aware of the work of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and of the importance of such figures as Frederic W. H. Myers (for links to information on Myers and his own writings click here, and for a bibliography on Myers, click here). While these issues were not the main thrust of Ellenberger’s work, both his prestige as a scholar and his painstaking research opened the door to the positive consideration of psychical research as an influential force in psychology (on Ellenberger’s contributions to the historiography of psychiatry and psychology see Micale, 1993).

More recently, others have expanded considerably on Ellenberger. Examples are Alan Gauld’s A History of Hypnotism (1992), and Adam Crabtree’s From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (1993). Both authors discuss mesmerism and hypnosis, but Crabtree also includes spiritualism and psychical research in his discussion. They have shown that a variety of concepts of the mind, such as ideas of subconscious mental activity, received a significant input from those areas that have been neglected and have been labeled as pseudoscience or simply as peripheral because they were related to parapsychological phenomena. As Crabtree (1993) has argued, all of this research coming from mesmerism and psychical research brought “scientific thinking to bear on phenomena that had largely been reserved for philosophical and theological speculation. And this in turn allowed the development, for the first time, of systematic and effective psychological healing” (p. 280). Furthermore, Crabtree argued following Ellenberger, that “some of the very first speculations on unconscious mental activity” came from attempts to explain table turning (p. ix). Similarly, Crabtree pointed out that studies of hypnosis conducted by SPR members “led to important discoveries about the nature of somnambulistic consciousness” (p. ix).

To some extent, Bertrand Méheust’s (1999a, 1999b) two-volume work Somnambulisme et mediumnité (1784-1930) also chronicles some of this, although his emphasis is on the rejection of psychic phenomena by society, and particularly by scientists and scientific institutions. In any case one may argue that the study of something as hypnosis did not progress simply by shedding the parapsychological. Instead students of parapsychological phenomena were actively contributing conceptually even if their claims are not generally accepted today.

The dissemination of ideas about the subconscious and about the potential of the mind took place to some extent through psychical research and popular writings on psychic phenomena. Some of this is evident in the writings of Fuller (1986), Powell (1979) and Shamdasani (1993). Eugene Taylor (1996) argued in his book William James on Consciousness Beyond the Margins that the writings of SPR workers “were the main conduit to the United States for the latest developments in scientific psychotherapy in England, the Netherlands, Europe and Switzerland. Through them the earliest work of Pierre Janet on dissociation and multiple consciousness was first corroborated and transmitted to the United States in 1887, and in the early 1890s the British group [the SPR], through James and his Boston colleagues, became the route through which first news of the work of Breuer and Freud on hysteria entered the American psychological literature” (p. 23).

There is no question that the efforts of the SPR were influential during the nineteenth century and later in the development of the concept of subconscious selves and of dissociation. A recent article documented the contributions of the SPR workers to the study of dissociation (Alvarado 2002). It was argued that for the 1882-1900 period no other institution in England contributed to our knowledge of dissociation to the same extent as did the SPR. This included the hypnotic work of Edmund Gurney) and the theoretical analyses of Frederic W. H. Myers (e.g., links, bibliography) of the subliminal mind, among other lines of work. For a discussion of Myers’s contributions to psychology see Emily W. Kelly’s (2001) paper.


The SPR work was influential on others, as has been briefly argued by Alvarado (2002). Myers’s work was particularly influential. As Taylor (1996) has argued: “Myers’s formulations were ... central to the development of [William] James’s psychology and philosophy in the 1890s, and they form the epistemological core of James’s scientific activities in abnormal psychology and psychical research” (p. 79). Others have argued that Myers influenced American lay psychotherapeutic movements (Powell, 1979) as well as such figures as Pierre Janet (Crabtree, 2003; Le Maléfan, 1999). I (Alvarado, 2004) have presented a short discussion of the reception of Myers’s classic book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death.

Other authors have argued for the importance of the study of psychic phenomena in the development of European psychiatry and psychology. In Folie et Spiritisme: Histoire du Discourse Psychopathologique sur la Pratique du Spiritisme, ses Abords et ses Avatars (1850-1950), Pascal Le Maléfan (1999) argued that French psychiatrists, threatened by the phenomena produced by mediums, reacted by appropriating some of the features of mediumship through the creation of particular psychiatric conditions. While the phenomena were not accepted as paranormal they influenced psychiatry and psychology nonetheless. Further examples of this, Le Maléfan argued, were the discussions of mediumship as examples of “doubling” (dédoublement), or the dissociation of consciousness in mediums. Among those influenced by SPR work and by the phenomena of mediums in their conceptualizations of dissociation, were such figures as Alfred Binet, Pierre Janet and Theodore Flournoy.

In Naissannce d’une Science Humaine: La Psychologie: Les Psychologues et le “Merveilleux Psychique”, Régine Plas (2000) argued that the idea of a subconscious mind was intimately connected to the study of psychic phenomena in France. She documented the telepathic (“mental suggestion”) work of Pierre Janet and Charles Richet, among others. In her view, “attempts to understand how thought could be transmitted ... without apparent exterior signs is what affirmed the existence of a substantive and psychic unconscious” (p. 122).

Alvarado (2002), Crabtree (1993, 2003), Méheust (1999b), and Shamdasani (1993) argue that psychical researchers have contributed to our knowledge of automatisms. Similarly, the early ESP work of Charles Richet and others contributed to the development of statistical techniques and of randomization procedures in psychology (on this see Hacking [1988], who cannot conceal his distrust and dismissal of psychical research). The point has also been made that a good proportion of the modern psychological studies of out-of-body experiences have been contributed by researchers who worked in the context of parapsychology and published in parapsychology journals (Alvarado, 1992).

There is certainly much to be done to study the contributions of psychical research to psychological knowledge. I would argue that parapsychology has contributed actively to the development of concepts of the mind, particularly the mind as a nonphysical agent. The ideas of Myers as well as of such later workers as William McDougall, J. B. Rhine, Robert Thouless and B. P. Weisner, and John Beloff are cases in point. Regardless of the validity of those views, perhaps we should see them as historians do when they examine the philosophical and scientific ideas of Aristotle and Descartes today. That is, regardless of their current validity or acceptance, we can see these ideas as contributions to the intellectual history of our attempts to understand human nature.

There have also been contributions to conventional ways to explain parapsychological phenomena that deserve study and recognition. Psychical researchers themselves, and not only their critics, have been active along these lines. This includes fraud (such as the work of Hereward Carrington, and Julian Ochorowicz), problems with human testimony (Edmund Gurney, Richard Hodgson, Eleonor M. Sidgwick, Donald J. West) and phenomena such as hallucinations, automatisms and the creation of secondary personalities (Théodore Flournoy, James H. Hyslop, Enrico Morselli, F. W. H. Myers, and René Sudre). Perhaps one day we will see such parapsychologists as Whately Carington, J.G. Pratt, Charles Stuart, and Charles Honorton credited as contributors to methodologies to measure mentation quantitatively.

Furthermore, I would like to see future histories of psychology mention the contributions of parapsychologists to the human potential movement and to the empirical study of the variety of human experience. Future examinations of the work of parapsychologists may extend our understanding to the point that we may see histories that do not trivialize parapsychology work even if the ontological status of our claims has not been resolved. This does not need to be limited to psychology. As seen in some existing works (e.g., Biondi, 1988; Luckhurst, 2002), interest in, and study of, psychic phenomena has interacted with and influenced literature, religion and many practices and beliefs.