Journal: Global Journal of Classical Theology
Volume: GJCT 08:3 (Jan 2011)
Article: Groundhog Day: Psychoanalysis And Christianity
Author: Samuel T. Goldberg

Groundhog Day:
Psychoanalysis And Christianity1

Samuel T. Goldberg

The movie Groundhog Day shows the progression of a narcissistically fixated character from disdainful isolation, through abandonment and despair, finally to profound reengagement with the world of others. This paper describes his personal evolution both in terms of psychoanalysis, and also as a paradigmatic Christian rebirth.

Groundhog Day depicts a TV weatherman, Phil Conners, caught in an inexplicable time-warp. Each morning starts not a new day, but a repetition of the same one, endlessly. He alone recognizes the re-enactments. This necessity and opportunity to view and re-view how he lives moves him from his characteristic disdain, to despair, to hope, and ultimately to profound personality change.

In this sense, Phil undergoes something like a psychoanalysis. There also, the treatment’s open-endedness creates for the patient a sense of timelessness. Analysis provides boundless opportunity to explore and study one’s life experience and habits, to discover inexhaustibly new facets and articulations behind what may have seemed a plain surface. As does Phil, one finds that the present is infinitely penetrable; the more one looks, the more one sees. In analysis also, one moves inexorably from preoccupation with external events and circumstances towards inner self-observation. Gaining greater distance, one sees the extent to which one has made himself who he is and his life what it is. If there is unhappiness, one can learn, as does Phil, to what extent one’s own choices have helped create it. In this regard, analysis involves self-confrontation that can be painful, but increasing personal responsibility. If one can understand and change himself, one can understand and change his life. In self-confrontation, there is opportunity, a new chance.2

While discussing Groundhog Day from a psychoanalytic perspective, we cannot in fairness ignore the intentions of the producers and writers of the film. They unmistakably intended to depict Phil’s psychological crisis and development in terms of Christianity. At the very center and turning point of the film, Phil dives from a building with his hands and arms extended as if he were impaled on the cross. The very next scene has him wondering if he is a god, if not The God, because of his apparent immortality. Rita alludes to her Catholic education, but Phil performs miracles of prescience, making her believe in him. She chooses to stay with him, to bear witness.

Since both Christianity and psychoanalysis concern themselves with the healing of the human soul, both grappling with the same human experience, and since in Phil we have a single cas...