This chapter is an attempt to review the role of psychoanalysis in film theory, and in particular, the way it has been used to propose a metapsychology of cinema. The use of the term metapsychology follows Freud's description of his papers on "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes", "Repression" and "The Unconscious", published in 1915, as metapsychological; that is, concerned with producing general theoretical concepts for the understanding of human psychology. In a similar way, a metapsychology of cinema will be concerned with the phenomenon of cinema in general for the individual psyche. It asks, how is the spectator a subject, in the psychoanalytic sense, for cinema? How does cinema work on us and for us as psychical subjects, that is, as subjects of desire?