20 Mind-Blowing Facts You Didn’t Know About Groundhog Day

14. It's All About Psycho-Analysis

Critics are always falling over themselves to compare films to psycho-analysis: after all, it's attractive to think of the cinema screen as an unconscious mirror (in which case Lars Von Trier has some serious issues).

In a talk at the Hudson Union Society, Harold Ramis talked about the number of psychiatric professionals who told him that obviously the movie's a metaphor for psychoanalysis, because we revisit the same stories and keep reliving these same patterns in our life. And the whole goal of psychoanalysis is to break those patterns of behaviour.€

Again, it's an alluring reading, and it does make a lot of sense, but it does suggest that humanity's psyche is inherently broken... Ah well, at least it leads to entertaining films.

The theory, which also turned up in a 2006 article in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis fits more because of some of Ramis and Rubin's creative changes. For instance, Rubin admitted that he wanted to have more escape sequences - "I had him driving and riding snowmobiles and stealing a plane and trying to teach himself how to fly, etc." That would have distracted from Phil's more gentle approach to self-realisation (aside form his suicides, of course).