Psychoanalysts to break down films of Pedro Almodóvar

You may well have thought, watching a Pedro Almodóvar movie, that psychoanalysts would have a field day with his work. Now they have the chance, after a US psychiatric institute announced plans for a symposium on the Spanish director's films, which include All About My Mother and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

The New Centre for Psychoanalysis at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) will host the event, called Mirrors of the Heart: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar – which is open to the public as well as to professionals – on 16 April, as well as a series of Friday night screenings of the director's films. The conference is a follow-up to a similar event the centre hosted last year dealing with the films of Charlie Kaufman.

One of the course presenters, Peter Wolson, told the Hollywood Reporter: "Charlie Kaufman's films are so fantastical that there is an emotional distance. With Almodóvar, you're emotionally gripped. He has psychological credibility because he's not trying to therapise these situations; he's just taking us into them. It's not like The Sopranos, with a therapist trying to analyse a psychopath and [you] wondering how real and effective that is."

Even the briefest consideration of some of Almodóvar's plots, such as that of Volver – a tale of sexual abuse, infidelity and mothers returning from the dead – Talk to Her, where two men strike up a bond while keeping vigil over two women in comas, or Live Flesh, where a man still holds a candle for an ex-lover who is married to the former policeman he shot and paralysed, suggests a day might not be long enough for the analysis.

Promotional material for the course says: "The films of Pedro Almodóvar entertain us with a dreamy, libidinous consciousness, opening hidden truths about the human heart. Almodóvar takes us to a parallel universe where autonomy trumps inhibition, and where in caring for his characters we enter into surprising identification with them."

"If you go through the entire canon of Almodóvar," said Wolson, "you'll see all the perversions known to us."