Moving Images

Psychoanalytic reflections on film

Andrea Sabbadini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317806127
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The experience of watching films – entertaining, moving, instructive, frightening or exciting as they may be – can be enriched by the opportunity to reflect upon them from unconventional perspectives.Psychoanalytic Reflections on Film: Moving Images offers its readers in an accessible language one such viewpoint, informed by Andrea Sabbadini's psychoanalytic insights and therapeutic experience. Using a psychoanalytic interpretative approach, some twenty-five important feature films are discussed as the artistic vehicles of new, unsuspected meanings.

The first chapter looks at films which represent psychoanalytic work itself, having therapists and their patients as their main characters. The remaining five chapters cover movies on themes of central concern to analytic theorists and clinicians, such as childhood and adolescent development, and varieties of intimate relationships among adults. The latter include romantic love and its disturbing association to death fantasies; eroticism and prostitution; and voyeuristic desire – a significant phenomenon in this context given its parallels with the activity of watching films. Andrea Sabbadini's psychoanalytic approach, which explores the part played by unconscious factors in shaping the personality and behaviour of film characters, is used to interpret their internal world and the emotional conflicts engendered by the vicissitudes they live through. The book is completed by a filmography and biographical notes on film directors.

Psychoanalytic Reflections on Film presents the relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis as a complex one. These two most different of cultural phenomena are shown to share a wish on the part of their practitioners to uncover profound truths about the human condition, and to provide a language with which to describe them. Going beyond futile 'psycho-historical' attempts to analyse filmmakers through their products, or a superficial application of psychoanalytic concepts to film, Sabbadini shows how both cinema and psychoanalysis can benefit from a meaningful interdisciplinary dialogue between them. The book will be of special interest to practicing psychoanalysts and students, scholars and historians of film studies.

Chapter 1
A young profession

Films on psychoanalysis

The films considered in this first chapter, by featuring as their main characters analysts and/or their patients (with one exception, as I will explain), attempt to represent – but often end up mis-representing – psychoanalysis itself. In these movies our profession is sometimes presented in the dramatically effective but inaccurate version of the therapist being engaged in the recovery of repressed traumas for the explanation of current events, with much use of flashbacks (the filmic equivalent of memory). This approach has been exploited, for instance, in some of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies, such as Spellbound (1945) and Marnie (1964). Spellbound is also an example of the way in which psychoanalysis is often misrepresented in cinema by showing analysts acting out their (counter-transference) love for their analysands as they get involved in romantic or sexual activities with each other. An exception to this caricaturization can be found in the television series In Treatment (2010) in which the character of the psychotherapist (played by Gabriel Byrne) is shown as emotionally vulnerable to the seductive temptations of one of his patients, but professional enough to resist enacting his erotic feelings for her.¹

Another distorted picture of our profession on the screen concerns the suggestion, to comical effect, that analysts are more insane than their patients (Deconstructing Harry, Allen 1997). Other times analysts are portrayed as naive, unprofessional, greedy, abusive, or even involved in criminal activities. Freud may have been right in his letter of 9 June 1925 to Karl Abraham, who had invited him to collaborate on the first film project ever made about psychoanalysis, Secrets of a Soul (Pabst 1926). Freud replied: “I do not believe that satisfactory plastic representation of our abstractions is at all possible” (Abraham and Freud 1965, p. 547).

Films which represent the psychoanalytic profession may have as their main characters a psychoanalyst (The Son’s Room, Moretti 2001), Freud himself (Freud: The Secret Passion, Huston 1962), psychoanalytic patients (Nineteen Nineteen, Brody 1985), or both analyst and analysand (Secrets of a Soul, Pabst 1926; My Own Executioner, Kimmins 1948; Inconscientes, Oristrell 2004). Not surprisingly, prominent patients involved in scandalous relationships have attracted special attention from filmmakers – at least three of them in Sabina Spielrein’s case: My Name Was Sabina Spielrein (Màrton 2002), The Soul Keeper (Faenza 2003), and A Dangerous Method (Cronenberg 2011).

The earliest example of something approaching the presence of psychoanalysis in a film can be found in The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador by French director Léonce Perret (1912). In this film, “a celebrated foreign alienist physician” saves the heroine Suzanne from madness by utilizing the “luminous vibrations of cinematographic images” to induce in her a hypnotic state leading to psychotherapeutic suggestion (see Bergstrom 1999, pp. 15–20). However, the first serious filmic representation of psychoanalysis is the German feature Secrets of a Soul (Pabst 1926), while psychoanalysis only reached Hollywood in the 1940s with Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945).

Freud was reserved about his personal life, sceptical about biographies of any kind, and unsympathetic to the medium of cinema. He only reluctantly agreed to be filmed in 1928 by one of his American patients, Philip R. Lehman, for a documentary that was also to include shots of many other prominent psychoanalysts. Its final fifty-minute (!) version, entitled Sigmund Freud: His Family and Colleagues, 1928–1947, was edited, restored and completed by Lehman’s daughter Lynne Lehman Weiner and released in 1985 (Marinelli 2004). However, Freud would have thought of a feature film about himself – such as John Huston’s Freud. The Secret Passion (1962) – anathema. This movie, though, turned out to be no conventional Hollywood biopic as it is concerned not so much with Freud-the-man but with a subject matter that we know to be fundamentally resistant to representation: the Unconscious itself. Making this movie caused drama among Huston, Universal Pictures, Huston’s first screenwriter (no less than the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre), and the film’s eponymous star, a sensitive if also disturbed Montgomery Clift. The film concentrates on the early years of psychoanalysis, from 1885 to Freud’s father’s death in 1896 and the publication at the turn of the century of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Crucial to those years are the discovery and then the abandonment (circa 1897) of the so-called seduction theory of psychoneurosis, which provide the theoretical underpinnings to the movie’s narrative. Freud’s patient in the film, Cecily (Susannah York), a composite of the published case histories of Anna O., Dora and others, is affected by severe hysterical symptoms eventually understood by Freud in relation to her childhood’s Oedipal fantasies. Or should I say traumata? It is remarkable that Freud’s abandonment, more than a century ago, of the seduction theory should still today cause heated arguments about psychoanalysis. Seduction or abuse? The emphasis has moved, with the words, from a view of the child colluding (i.e. playing some role in the event, however ambiguously defined) to that of the child being a passive victim. Far beyond semantics, this dilemma seems often unresolvable, for it concerns the impossibility of differentiating the relative effects of psychological and external reality – fantasy from history. In Huston’s film, Freud and Cecily embark upon a journey towards self-knowledge, with an insistence on the imagery of light and darkness emphasizing the arduous character of such a quest.

It must be noticed here that one of the problems concerning many of the representations of our psychoanalytic profession on the screen is a certain confusion, especially in the minds of Hollywood filmmakers and their audiences, between psychoanalysis and psychiatry.² Such confusion is at least in part justified by the fact that until not long ago all American psychoanalysts were also psychiatrists. It is a small but significant detail that psychiatrists display portraits of Freud on their walls in such important films about mental institutions as Litvak’s The Snake Pit (1948), Johnson’s The Three Faces of Eve (1957) and Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963), a group of films that also includes Forman’s popular One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).

Secrets of a Soul³ by Georg Wilhelm Pabst was completed in 1926. Through this experimental project backed by the powerful Berlin UFA film company, producer and co-screenwriter Hans Neumann intended to present psychoanalysis to the general public in a scientifically correct, but also visually engaging form. Two leading analysts of the time agreed to act as consultants for this project: then-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association Karl Abraham, who died three months before the film opened, and his Berlin Poliklinik colleague Hanns Sachs. They provided clear enough guidelines to allow Pabst, one of the major film directors of the Weimar generation, to produce not quite the Lehrfilm (educational documentary) that Neumann and Abraham had originally intended, but an attractive and thought-provoking account of psychoanalysis. It was the first and arguably one of the most successful attempts of this kind to date.⁴

We cannot be certain about Freud’s reasons for dissociating himself from this well-meaning project – an attitude which Friedberg calls “a reaction-formation of defense and suspicion” (Friedberg 1990, p. 41). After all, for the sake of making psychoanalytic ideas more widely available, in those same years Freud had been prepared to write entries for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Freud 1923) and “An Autobiographical Study” (Freud 1925b). As mentioned above, he wrote to Abraham that he did not believe that psychoanalysis could be represented in film. However, as Friedberg points out, Freud himself had been looking for “topological metaphors to describe and make more tangible the otherwise abstract concept of the unconscious” (Friedberg 1990, p. 44), as is clear from his own paper A Note upon the “Mystic Writing Pad” (Freud 1925a).

Furthermore, there is a rare and remarkable reference to cinema in a letter Freud wrote from Rome to his family as early as 22 September 1907. Its relevant section is worth quoting:

On the Piazza Colonna behind which I am staying, as you know, several thousand people congregate every night.… [O]n the roof of a house at the other end of the piazza there is a screen on which a società Italiana projects lantern slides (fotoreclami). They are actually advertisements, but to beguile the public these are interspersed with pictures of landscapes, Negroes of the Congo, glacier ascents, and so on. But since these wouldn’t be enough, the boredom is interrupted by short cinematographic performances for the sake of which the old children (your father included) suffer quietly the advertisements and monotonous photographs. They are stingy with these tidbits, however, so I have had to look at the same thing over and over again. When I turn to go I detect a certain tension in the crowd, which makes me look again, and sure enough a new performance has begun, and so I stay on. Until 9 p.m. I usually remain spellbound; then I begin to feel too lonely in the crowd, so I return to my room to write to you all after having ordered a bottle of fresh water. The others who promenade in couples or undici, dodici stay on as long as the music and lantern slides last.

(in E. L. Freud 1961, pp. 261–262).

What Freud says in this letter promises a future fascination for the new art form; however, not only did he not believe that psychoanalytic ideas could be represented by cinema but, for the rest of his life, he displayed as little interest in films as he had in some other artistic disciplines such as music. “Filmmaking can be avoided as little as – so it seems – bobbed hair,” Freud wrote in a letter to Sándor Ferenczi on 14 August 1925, “but I myself won’t get mine cut, and don’t intend to be brought into personal connection with any film” (in Falzeder and Brabant 2000, p. 222).

In the above-quoted letter to Abraham, Freud had added about Secrets of a Soul: “I would much prefer if my name did not have anything to do with it at all,”⁵ but he must have known that this would not be possible. On 26 July 1926 the New York Times claimed that Freud himself was going to direct the film! We are also intrigued today by the “good deal of consternation” (Jones 1957, p. 121) this good movie has apparently attracted from the psychoanalytic establishment as a whole, in spite of its commercial and critical success and the fact that it is difficult to imagine what there is in Secrets of a Soul to which psychoanalysts of the time could have objected. But then most of the attacks on the film came from those who apparently had not even seen it. There is no question that “faced with the choice of either popularising psychoanalysis properly or risking being damned for not having done so, Abraham and Sachs decided to do that which they considered would best serve the Cause” (Ries 1995, p. 767).

Pabst’s achievement here is impressive as he manages to put forward a detailed, accurate and respectful fictional account, with the structure of a detective story, of the psychoanalytic case of a middle-aged neurotic chemist. We watch Martin Fellman (Werner Krauss) becoming extremely jealous when he hears that a younger man (i.e. his wife’s cousin and his own childhood friend), will be visiting them soon. His madness, revealed in the film both in his behaviour and in a dream (at ten full minutes, one of the longest in the history of cinema), takes the form of a phobia of knives, razors and other blades, which he feels compelled to use destructively against his wife. A not-too-coincidental encounter with psychoanalyst Dr Orth (played by the Russian actor Pavel Pavlov), to whom he will freely reveal his feelings as well as recount his frightening dream, will resolve his psychopathology.⁶

The lead role is played by that famous actor Werner Krauss, who had been the Döppelganger mad psychiatrist in the horror Expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Wiene 1920). Not an easy task, also considering the paradox that this is a silent film about the talking cure. This, though, is perhaps also one of its assets: because the film is silent, we the viewers, who are only given minimum help by a few inter-titles, have to make a more creative use of our own imagination in order to understand the movie’s complexities. Compare this stylish effort with the vulgar caricatures of our profession in so many Hollywood movies of the 1950s and 1960s, where analysts take masses of useless notes during sessions, flood their patients with superficial interpretations, and frequently end up on the couch with them.⁷

Secrets of a Soul belongs to that intermediate æsthetic territory that could be located between the claustrophobic theatrical worlds of Expressionism and Kammerspiel, and the emergence of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) of Pabst’s best works, such as The Joyless Street (1925) and Pandora’s Box (1928). In these we see a “veristic” approach that was to evolve during the Second World War into the Italian Neorealismo.⁸ The Expressionistic component of the film is evident in its manneristic use of symbolism. In his critical appraisal of Pabst, described as an ambiguous figure with an extraterritorial career, Rentschler noticed that “blades sever links and create new boundaries. Mirrors, likewise, fix identities and confound the self. It is fitting that Pabst’s early study of male anxiety, Secrets of a Soul, introduces both props into the opening sequence as pliers of uncertainty” (Rentschler 1990, pp. 2–3). Other symbolically loaded objects are prominent (a phallic tower, a key, a doll), especially in the dream sequence where we also find a number of special effects, such as superimpositions and reverse motion, to represent the mechanisms of condensation and displacement of the dream-work.

It is interesting to note that the dream images, which have a dark background when first used to illustrate the progression of Martin Fellman’s psychopathology, are then repeated with a whitened background when the dream is reported to the analyst. Then the analyst as Deus ex machina provides the interpretations that will pave the Royal Road to the resolution of our chemist’s problems. Symbolism, we may notice, was also a trademark of the Surrealist movement that in those same years was producing other analysis-inspired films, such as Lu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A young profession: films on psychoanalysis
• 2 … and the oldest one: films on prostitution
• 3 The young ones: films on children
• 4 … and slightly older ones: films on adolescents
• 5 Between eros and thanatos: films on love
• 6 Watching voyeurs: films on scopophilia
• Appendix
• References
• Index