Brown, Nick and Bruce McPherson. “Dream and Photography in a Psychoanalytic Film: Secrets of a Soul.” Dreamworks: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Dream and Film. 1.1 (Spring 1980): 35-45.

This article in the inaugural issue of Dreamworks, a short-lived interdisciplinary journal on the relationship of dreams to human creativity (with each spring issue devoted to dream and film), marks the affinity and convergence of film and psychoanalysis particularly in terms of Freud's dream theory. Browne and McPherson emphasize the analogy between how dreams and films are experienced and look at Pabst's Secrets of a Soul as the first "deliberate conjunction between psychoanalysis and film" (36). They discuss Freud's skepticism of and refusal to participate in the project, but note that although psychoanalysis was seen as sensational at the time, the film succeeds in avoiding any explicitly sexual content. The authors use Derrida's "Freud and the Scene of Writing" to show how Freud uses the mechanical analogy of photography to describe the dream process. They also note that Derrida takes Freud's "Mysitcal Writing Pad" as a model for memory because he needed a form of writing capable of combining continuous freshness of surface and depth of retention. Browne and McPherson note how the film emphasizes the difference between story and interpretation, and read the main character as a witness or spectator of his dream, which represents an unresolved oedipal configuration/primal scene.