Friedberg, Anne. An Unheimlich Maneuver between Psychoanalysis and Cinema: Secrets of the Soul (1926).

Call#: Van Pelt Library PN1998.3.P34 F5 1990

Friedberg, Anne. “An Unheimlich Maneuver between Psychoanalysis and Cinema: Secrets of the Soul (1926).” The Films of G.W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema. Ed. Eric Rentschler. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers UP, 1990.

Friedberg introduces her article with a look at the twin birth of psychoanalysis and cinema and argues that "Freud's theory of the unconscious. . .was, from the start, a theory in search of an apparatus. Yet the cinema, an apparatus which could reproduce and project specular images, from its beginnings, an apparatus in search of a theory" (41). Drawing on Chodorkoff and Baxter, Friedberg offers a reading of the history of the making of Secrets of the Soul, including Freud's rejection of the project. She calls the film the first 'that directly tried to represent psychoanalytic descriptions of the etiology of a phobia and the method of psychoanalytic treatment" (45). Friedberg points to the various ironic name puns having to do with Freud's lack of involvment in the film: that Pabst, the director of Joyless Street--Die FREUDlose Gasse (my emphasis) was asked to direct a film "mit Freud," when Freud refused to be involved; and that the actor who plays the pshychoanalyst in Secrets, Pavel Pavlov, shares his name with "Freud's mightiest theoretical opponent, the physiologist Ivan Pavlov" (46). Friedman goes on to describe and analyze the film, which she notes is separated into five parts: Pre-Dream; The Dream; Post-Dream; Analysis; and Cure. She notes that the happy ending of the film works as a kind of advertisement for psychoanalysis, arguing that Abraham and Sachs in consulting on the film, intented to "extol its curative virtues" (51).

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Friedberg, Anne. An Unheimlich Maneuver between Psychoanalysis and Cinema: Secrets of the Soul (1926).