“12 Angry Men”. The Group and the Individual: From Objectiveness to Subjectiveness

Screened fiction stirs people’s psyches through emotions, which refer to a virtual world and therefore have the potential to help the individual grow in self-awareness while feeling relatively “safe”. An innovative method to work on movies for education and training purposes was developed by Eugenio Torre, and is proposed here for the film 12 Angry Men. This movie may be used in training settings focused on helping relationships to reflect upon the meaning of being an individual in a group, being a group, responsibility and choice. A key to the reading of the movie is proposed at two different but complementary levels. From an “extra-psychical” standpoint, movie characters may represent a working group of 12 very different people sharing a task, while from an “intra-psychical” one, each character may represent an embodiment or symbol of an individual’s part and/or complex. According to the movie suggestion, we describe a path from objectiveness to subjectiveness and the final accomplishment of an ethical choice.