Call #: Van Pelt AS30.M48

 

Konigsberg, Ira . “Cinema, Psychoanalysis, and Hermeneutics: G.W. Pabst's "Secrets of a Soul.” Michigan Quarterly Review. 34.4 (1995): 518-547.

Konigsberg frames his article on Secrets of a Soul with a note on Freud's legacy and influence on film, in particular the subgenre of the psychoanlytic salvational film, of which Secrets is the first. He opens with a discussion of problematic therapist characters in film which have evolved into Frankenstein-like figures who overstep their bounds in trying to control their patients' bodies and minds (e.g. Body Heat and The Silence of the Lambs), and he notes the irony that the first film psychoanalyst and the first film analysand was played by the same actor (Pavel Pavlov). Konigsberg offers a deep analysis of Secrets of a Soul, which considers the violent sexuality and homosexual strain hidden beneath the surface of the main narrative. His main purpose in the end is to show that psychoanalysis in and of film provides a 20th-century hermeneutic--that of searching for multiple and often non-contradictory meanings in texts that are never originary, and he concludes that Freud's shift from taking photography to taking the "mystic writing pad" as a model for the psyche is appropriate.

Chodorkoff and Baxter provide a detailed historical account of the making of Pabst's Secrets of a Soul, taking it as an important example of post-World War I German film, which offers a "significant by forgotten aspect of the history of psychoanalysis" (319). They include a brief reception history as well as a look at the film's form and structure and the experimental nature of presenting dream on the screen in an historical context. They also quote extensively from the letters of Karl Abraham and Freud on the subject of the making of the film and film in general to show Freud's lack of interest in the project--Freud was concerned with protecting psychoanalysis from exploitation and delegitimation. Chodorkoff and Baxter's treatment of the dynamic between Abraham and Freud over film offers context to Freud's often-quoted assertion that "satisfactory plastic representation of our abstractions is at all possible" (323). But the authors find that despite Freud's notion that psychoanalysis could not be captured on film, the resulting film is better at representing psychoanalysis "plastically" than "verbally"--the film uses an excess of text in the form of titles (sub- and inter-), which take away from the film's successes. Finally, the authors read Secrets of the Soul as an historical document that sheds light on early psychoanalytic practice, and they end with a note on the repressed homosexuality in the film, which they suggest is exemplary of Weimer cinema.