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Sandra Cohen Ph.D.

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Sandra Cohen Ph.D.

Dr. Sandra Cohen is a certified Psychoanalyst and Trauma Informed Specialist focused on childhood trauma and its aftereffects. Speaker. Author. Educator. We see.

My name is Dr. Sandra Cohen and I am a certified psychoanalyst and licensed clinical psychologist with a practice in Beverly Hills, California. Each time I watch a film, TV show or read a book, my psychoanalyst’s mind begins to construct the same kind of understandings I might give to my patients. Pop culture often depicts real human problems with startling accuracy. Why is this so? Fictional characters are informed by their writer’s experiences and made more convincing by what we bring as we watch or read. Our unconscious minds unite with the writer’s. Personal experience is made public. We relate. We know. The early memories and unconscious struggles of these characters show us what we can’t so easily know about other people or ourselves. My musings at Characters on the Couch give me a chance to tell you what I see in ways similar to how I talk with my patients.

01/06/2026

Desperation doesn’t just narrow your options — it can drive you out of your mind.

In No Other Choice, Man-su isn’t a monster by nature. He’s a man whose identity has collapsed. His work defined his worth. His success defined his masculinity. When that disappears, humiliation takes over — and humiliation is psychic annihilation.
Trauma pulls him inward. Empathy shuts down. Other people stop mattering. All that remains is the desperate need to erase the feeling of being less than. In that state, morality doesn’t vanish — it warps. Violence begins to feel logical. Permanent. Necessary.

What’s most chilling is not that Man-su kills, but that he feels nothing. To survive, he becomes mechanical — a mirror of the very system that made him obsolete. Replaced by machines, he becomes one himself.

He gets the job. Life resumes. But numbness is not a victory. And feeling nothing is not freedom. Deep inside he knows what he has done.

That’s the real cost of having “no other choice.”

01/02/2026

In David Fincher’s Mank, talent isn’t the problem. Love is present. Recognition comes. Even an Oscar arrives. And still, Herman Mankiewicz drinks himself to death.

Why? Because when childhood belittlement becomes an inner voice, no amount of success can quiet it. Mank’s brilliance lives alongside a relentless self-contempt that turns love into something dangerous and hope into something he repairs over and over so it can’t let him escape.

Arrogance becomes armor. Alcohol becomes refuge. Contempt becomes control. And the tragedy isn’t that Mank lacked support — it’s that he couldn’t believe he deserved it.

Fincher gives us a devastating portrait of how trauma doesn’t disappear with achievement, and how the safest prison can be the one you build inside yourself.

12/31/2025

This year, I found myself drawn again and again to stories that don’t turn away from psychic pain. Films and series where trauma, grief, hunger, rage, and love are not tidied up, but lived inside.

These characters struggle with vulnerability, fear of loss, unmet need, and the defenses we build to survive what once felt unbearable. Some harden. Some dissociate. Some repeat what hurt them. And a few begin, slowly, to feel.

This is a year-end gathering of the films and shows from 2025 that stayed with me... not because they offered answers, but because they listened closely to the unconscious, and let it speak.

12/29/2025

“You are not unlovable.”

Evelyn doesn’t say this from a place of certainty. She says it from inside her own starvation for love.

This moment in Everything Everywhere All at Once is not about optimism or clever multiverses. It’s about what happens when a person has spent a lifetime being told what’s “right” instead of being loved for who they are. When self-esteem rests on fragile branches. When help feels dangerous. When kindness is mistaken for weakness. When the voice inside says, nothing matters, because hoping hurts too much.

Evelyn’s words land because they are finally spoken to the parts of herself she has disowned—her hunger, her fear, her shame, her need for love. Only then can she begin to see her daughter, her husband, and herself more clearly.

Depression tells you nothing matters. Love answers back: “that’s NOT true.”

Even in the most absurd, broken, unlived versions of our lives, something still matters. Someone still matters.

And that includes you.

12/22/2025

Love Actually isn’t a fairy tale. It’s a map of how love breaks — and how it sometimes survives anyway.

In Richard Curtis’s ensemble film, every character carries an old wound into love: betrayal, shame, grief, fear of exposure, guilt, longing for what can’t be had. Love doesn’t erase those wounds. It presses on them.

Some characters armor up.
Some retreat.
Some act out.
Some risk being seen.

What Curtis shows — and what psychoanalysis helps us see more clearly — is that love isn’t derailed by “bad luck.” It’s derailed by the defenses we build to survive earlier pain. And healing doesn’t come from perfection. It comes from honesty, repair, and the courage to stay present when it’s uncomfortable.

12/19/2025

In The Father, Anthony isn’t just forgetting names or faces; he’s losing himself. His sense of time. His independence. His identity. Like a tree stripped bare, piece by piece, until what once felt solid and alive can no longer hold.

Florian Zeller’s brilliance - and cruelty - is that we don’t watch this from a safe distance. We’re pulled inside Anthony’s mind, where past and present collapse, where paranoia and terror replace certainty, and where fighting to “manage on my own” is really a fight to hold onto who he was.

This line lands so hard because it’s not abstract. It’s bodily. Seasonal. Inevitable. Dementia doesn’t arrive all at once. It sheds you slowly, relentlessly, until even your own name feels like it belongs to someone else.

And beneath all that fear is something heartbreakingly simple: the wish to be held. To go home. To not be alone as everything falls away.

12/16/2025

This film is a horror story — not because of monsters, but because of therapy that fails when it matters most.

If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You shows what happens when trauma and hunger are misunderstood, shamed, and abandoned instead of held. Linda is not “difficult.” She is starving — for care, for understanding, for a place where her feelings don’t feel deadly. And the very people meant to help her make it worse.

Good therapy should be a safe place. A place where you can say anything. Where dissociation, rage, shame, and need are understood as clues, not character flaws. Where your hunger isn’t judged or pushed away — but listened to.

If your therapist yells at you, demeans you, shuts you down, or abandons you when you’re unraveling, that is not therapy. That is harm.

So yes — if your therapist is like the therapist (or Linda) in If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You: run.

You deserve care that helps you feel real, understood, and able to stand on your own legs again.

12/10/2025

Rage is never just rage.

In The Beast in Me, Aggie and Niles show us how unbearable grief hardens into stories of blame and hate, so you have to feel what’s underneath. One turns that pain inward, the other outward — but both are fighting the same monster: the terror of vulnerability.

When anger becomes a second skin, it can feel protective. But healing begins the moment you stop running from the feelings you’re afraid might break you. Aggie can face them. Nile can’t. And that’s the difference between destruction and repair.

12/08/2025

In His Three Daughters, fear of loss becomes its own kind of inheritance. Katie, Christina, and Rachel each learned to disconnect because connection once felt too dangerous to want. But when their father is dying, the very thing they fear most brings them back to each other.

This is the hard truth about loss: it can pull you apart, but it can also be the moment you finally turn toward the people you need.

12/05/2025

Rodney’s words sound insightful — even seductive — but that’s exactly why they’re so dangerous.

In Woman of the Hour, “being seen” isn’t what he offers. It’s what he exploits.Narcissistic predators know how to weaponize vulnerability. They sense who’s hungry to be noticed, who’s used to performing, who’s been taught to ignore their own red flags. They mirror your longing, then twist it into control.

What Rodney calls “never hiding” isn’t authenticity — it’s entitlement. A belief that his needs eclipse yours, that his gaze defines you, that your boundaries don’t matter.

Real seeing is mutual, safe, and grounded in respect.

What Rodney does is something else entirely: he looks through you, not at you. My full piece (link in bio) dives into why so many women miss these warning signs — and why trusting your instincts isn’t paranoia, it’s protection.

12/03/2025

With Wicked For Good now out, I wanted to revisit a piece I wrote last year about the first Wicked film — and why Elphaba was never the “wicked” one at all.

Her story mirrors what happens to so many abused children: blamed for what was never her fault, starved for love, taught to feel ashamed of her very existence. When you grow up inside that kind of hurt, anger isn’t evil — it’s a form of survival. It’s the moment you finally stop doing whatever it takes to earn love that was never freely given.

Elphaba’s rage was never the danger. The real danger is cruelty, manipulation, and the people who exploit a child’s longing to be seen. Rage can be the beginning of saying “No more,” and the first step toward healing what syour hame has buried.

11/24/2025

Sean Baker’s Anora helps us understand that you don’t run toward chaos unless you’re running away from something even more unbearable. Ani and Vanya aren’t wild or reckless by nature — they’re hungry kids who never had love they could trust, doing whatever they can to numb the kind of hurt that feels too big to touch.

When love has been cold or inconsistent, you learn to shut your feelings down just to survive. You say “no” to your needs, “no” to hope, “no” to wanting anything that could hurt you again. But hunger doesn’t disappear; it goes underground. And eventually, it bursts through — in fantasy, in impulsive choices, in the hope that someone might finally choose you.

That hope almost destroys Ani. But it also leads her to something she’s never had before: someone who actually sees her. Someone who recognizes her pain because he carries his own. Someone who doesn’t demand she be “tough” or silent.
Feeling your grief — letting it come out of hiding — is what begins to set you free.

For Ani, that moment is the real turning point.

✨ Dive deeper into Ani’s story on the blog — link in bio.

Address

435 N Bedford Drive, Ste 406
Beverly Hills, CA
90210

Opening Hours

Monday	8am - 5pm
Tuesday	8am - 5pm
Wednesday	8am - 5pm
Thursday	8am - 5pm
Friday	8am - 5pm

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+13102734827

Website

http://www.sandracohenphd.com/, https://linktr.ee/sandra.e.cohen.phd

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