Freud’s disinterest did not dissuade Goldwyn from pushing forward in his resolve to find a scriptwriter for an analytically based screenplay. One of Freud’s disciples, Karl Abraham, was willing to work with Goldwyn’s studio, resulting in a silent film called The Secret History of a Soul. This was one of the first Hollywood movies made with a narrative based on the theory of psychoanalysis. Hitchcock followed in the tradition of many Hollywood directors who were also influenced by Freud’s work. Several of Hitchcock’s films including Marnie, Spellbound and Psycho reflect a well developed understand of psychologically sophisticated material.  His 1945 film Spellbound was written by his producer David O. Selznick, who was himself in psychoanalysis. Spellbound, not regarded as one of Hitchcock’s best movies, stayed true to the psychoanalytic methodology using surreal dream sequences, to help move along the narrative. The director’s interest in the subject manner of Marnie seems to be a natural progression of his continuing interest in the psychoanalytically based storyline.

 

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0162-2870%28199123%2958%3C%3E1.0.CO%3B2-D

Sklarew, Bruce.  “Freud and Film: Encounters in the Weltgeist”  Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.  47.4: 1238-47.

Sklarew traces Freud's encounters with film from his involvement with Jean-Martin Charcot's use of time-lapse photography at the Salpetriere in 1885-86 to his "acting in home movies" toward the end of his life. Sklarew notes that the Lumiere brothers' unveiling of their projector in 1895 coincides with Freud's work on conceptualizing dream-thought: "Frued conceived all the essentials of his seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, at the beginning of 1896, although the book was not written until the summer of 1899" (1240), and goes on to suggest that dream work and film work are analogous processes. The article also mentions Freud's visits to the cinema--one with Jung and Ferenczi in New York in 1905 while he was in the US for the Clark University Lectures, and one in Vienna in the late 1930s to watch an American double feature. Sklarew suggests that Freud was skeptical of film because of its potential to exploit, asserting that Freud's famous 1925 rejection of Samuel Goldwyn's offer to consult on films for MGM (he turned down $100,000) and his refusal to collaborate on G.W. Pabst's 1926 Secrets of the Soul were the result of Freud's wish to protect psychoanalysis from sensationalist exploitation. The article ends with a turn toward Freud's aesthetic, which Sklarew suggests was "intellectual rather than sensual" (1246).

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.

Friedman, Susan Stanford.  Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle.  New York: New Directions, 2002. 

This is a collection of letters circulated by H.D., Bryher and their circle in the 1930s when H.D. was in analysis with Freud. The letters are from the period AFTER H.D. and Bryher worked on the film journal, Close Up but there are references to film in general and to G.W. Pabst in particular. Although there are no letters to or from Pabst, H.D. and Bryher both write to others about him with great enthusiasm.

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).

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.

Bergstrom examines the differences between Lang and Pabst's uses of "psychological explanation" in their films in order to show the wide spectrum of Weimar film's emphasis on psychology. She notes that while Pabst in such films as Pandora's Box and Secrets of the Soul emphasizes "'realistic' characters who are carefully individuated through psychological depth," Lang's characters are abstract types set up in contrast to institutions (163). Bergstom is not interested in psychoanalysis but in "how psychology is used at the narrative level" (164). Bergstrom reads Secrets of the Soul as didactic/educational film whose project is to legitimate psychoanalysis by showing how it works to diagnose and cure the film's central character. But she notes that the film is the least satisfying of those she examines because, while the main character is shown to have great psychological depth, the secondary characters are devoid of such depth.