Dream Factory

Sigmund Freud goes to the movies

Sigmund Freud is in the movies. He is on television. He is in
romantic comedies, period dramas, experimental
documentaries and science-fiction films. In some of these
productions, Sigmund Freud is at the centre of every scene. In
others, Sigmund Freud is only a walk-on, not even a speaking
part. Characters gather around him, ask him questions. They
call him Sigi and Sigismund and Herr Professor. Sigmund
Freud responds by saying what he wrote in letters and
published in academic journals. To a roomful of aliens he
says, Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. To an
animated puppy he whispers, Anatomy is destiny. Often he
acts as you might expect Sigmund Freud to act: like a
Victorian man of good manners with penetrating though
dangerous opinions. At other times, Sigmund Freud is not
Sigmund Freud, not the flesh and blood man, but the idea of
Sigmund Freud, a body-double flanked by quotation marks.
If Sigmund Freud is in the movies, that does not mean he likes
the movies. In fact, Sigmund Freud hates the movies. This is
surprising, considering how much the movies like Sigmund
Freud. In 1925, for example, Samuel Goldwyn announces his
intention to fly to Vienna to ask the father of pschoanalysis to
write a really great love story. According to Goldwyn,
Sigmund Freud is the greatest love specialist in the world.
Sigmund Freud cancels the meeting before it can happen. In
the following year, Hans Neumann and G.W. Pabst approach
Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs to make the first movie about
psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud once again does not
cooperate. When the movie, Secrets of the Soul (1926), is
released to critical acclaim, he does not see it.
Following Sigmund Freuds death from cancer and the death
of psychoanalysis to pharmacology, movies embrace him and
he returns the gesture. After 1958 he makes more than 50
appearances on big and small screens. Set free from science,
the ghost of Sigmund Freud walks Hollywood soundstages. In
Lovesick (1983), for example, he appears as a vision to a
distraught psychoanalyst played by Dudley Moore. In an
episode of Bewitched, a spell conjures him to psychoanalyze a
witchs marriage. In the Star Trek: The Next Generation
episode Phantasms (1993), his ghost is a hologram on the
About this article
Published on 01/06/11
By John Menick
David Cronenberg, A Dangerous
Method, due for release in late 2011
(Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund
Freud)
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starship enterprise, analyzing the dreams of the cyborg Data.
Sigmund Freud does not believe in ghosts. In psychoanalysis
he listens for them, hunts them, dispels them. It is not hard to
see this process as a kind of exorcism. Perhaps that is why
when a young Indiana Jones seeks Sigmund Freuds advice in
The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones (2007), he
resembles Max von Sydow. The former exorcist, Father
Lankester Merrin, is the perfect analogy for the
psychoanalyst, which, of course, would make Linda Blair
analogous to Bertha Pappenheim. To look like Von Sydow is a
daring move on the part of Sigmund Freud: he must change
himself completely. Max von Sydow is not the right height or
complexion; he is more convincing as a Nazi.
Luckily for the producers of The Adventures of Young
Indiana Jones, Sigmund Freud has a beard. Along with his
cigar, Sigmund Freuds beard is what signals to us that
Sigmund Freud is Sigmund Freud. This is true for Young
Indiana Jones and it is true for Freud, the six-hour 1984 bbc
miniseries. In this series, there are many beards. The bbc
make-up department has a beard for every stage of Sigmund
Freuds life, some more convincing than others, some better
trimmed than others. The beards laugh, grimace. They are
stroked in knowing contemplation, their edges stained with
nicotine, punctuated with fuming cigars.
Like many celebrities, Sigmund Freud is an addict. His drugs
of choice are nicotine and cocaine. He prefers the former
drug as a cigar, the latter mixed in water. The psychoanalyst
experiments with cocaine, both medically and recreationally,
during the 1880s and 1890s, but he smokes his entire life,
even as cancer consumes his palate and jaw. While almost all
productions show the smoking, almost none show the
cocaine. The exception is the bbc miniseries, which includes a
coke party Sigmund Freud throws for the Viennese medical
community. The 1984 miniseries shows much cocaine use a
fact one might attribute to the decade, perhaps.
The series fascination with the drug is matched only by that
of The Seven Percent Solution (1976), in which the cocaine
user is not Sigmund Freud, but Sherlock Holmes. In the
movie, set in 1891, Dr. Watson tricks the great detective into
going to Vienna after drug abuse drives Holmes to psychosis.
This is not just therapy it is also matchmaking. To no ones
surprise, Sigmund Freud and Holmes discover they have
much in common. (The historian Carlo Ginzburg makes this
affinity clear in his 1988 essay, Morelli, Freud and Sherlock
Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method.) The detective and the
analyst form a buddy-movie pair, pushing poor Watson aside
Sigmund Freud investigates criminal minds, while Holmes
investigates criminal trails. For both men, no detail is too
insignificant. They train each other, analyze each other. First
Holmes deduces Sigmund Freuds history from glancing at
the doctors office, then Sigmund Freud submits Holmes to
hypnotism. When Sigmund Freud snaps his fingers, ending
the hypnotic session, Holmes will remember nothing.
As an analyst, Sigmund Freud abandons hypnosis by 1890,
later calling the practice a senseless and worthless
proceeding. But many of his film roles include a pendulating
pocket watch. Sigmund Freud knows this is wrong, and he
says nothing. In his trailer he thinks that, for the movies,
hypnotism is a jump-cut past years of analytic work. He
suspects the movies love hypnotism because, in hypnotism,
movies see their double. If movies are like dreams, they are
also like the hypnotic session: tinged with black magic and
prone to treacherous suggestion.
With or without hypnosis, Sigmund Freud continues to see
patients. He sees Holmes and Data, Gustav Mahler, the Wolf
Man and Anna Freud. And there is the lesser-known Marilyn
Cuberle, a dowdy young woman who refuses to have an
operation to become beautiful. As shown in the 1964 Twilight
Zone episode, Number 12 Looks Just Like You, everyone in
the future has this operation. The young womans friends and
family explain the operation will make her permanently
happy and permanently beautiful. Refusing the operation is
an obvious sign of neurosis, perhaps melancholy, so
therefore Cuberle must see a shrink. Here, Sigmund Freud is
played out of character, and to protect his leading man
reputation, the analysts name is changed to Sigmund
Friend. We know what the fig leaf is hiding. When Cuberle
asks, Why does everyone want to force me to do something I
dont want to do? Sigmund Friend laughs darkly.
The role was difficult for Sigmund Freud. He usually does not
play a representative of the status quo. He prefers to play the
rebel, the intellectual and emotional outlaw. On screen, he is
a man of exploding emotions. His rages shake the antiquities.
In this way, John Hustons Freud: The Secret Passion (1962),
Sigmund Freuds first starring role, typecasts him for decades
to come. Beneath his calm surface works a pain worthy of
Montgomery Clift. As a graduate of the Actors Studio, he
uses the method to excavate the psyche and fearlessly present
his findings. In Hustons film, the method and psychoanalysis
meet. Through every scene Sigmund Freud searches for a
sense memory, for that buried ordeal that will bring a tremor
to his eyes.
Privately, among his friends, the psychoanalyst threatens
retirement. The movies no longer interest him, he says. Later
this year he will appear in A Dangerous Method, a movie
directed by David Cronenberg yet another historically
accurate drama and then no more. The trades report a
directorial project, perhaps a life of Moses. Poolside,
Sigmund Freud wishes for a second death. Anything to free
him from the airless repetition of costume drama. Perhaps
they will kill him, he thinks, with fame or a Lifetime
Achievement Award. Or perhaps he will continue in cinematic
purgatory, an unrecognized journeyman, an exile in his own
country.
John Menick
is an artist and writer living in New York.
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