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The production of the German film “Secrets of a Soul” (Geheimnisse einer Seele) in 1926 was an important element in the artistic and intellectual events of post-World War I Germany, and a significant but forgotten aspect of the history of psychoanalysis. Although not the first film dealing with serious psychological themes, or the cinematic presentation of mental phenomena, it was the first film to deal explicitly with the psychoanalytic conception of the mind, the causation of neurosis, and the psychoanalytic method of treatment.
The Austrian film director, G. W. Pabst, was a prominent film maker who had been involved with the German art movement, the “new reality” (“Die Neue Sachlichkeit”) characteristic of the 1920's. One film about the desperate inflation in Vienna and the increasing poverty in the middle-class was a powerful social indictment. “Joyless Street” (Freudlose Gasse) was a tour-de-force which sharply etched the chaos of the time primarily in social terms, paying close attention to the misery of life. It was in documentary style, but with a melodramatic tendency. (1)
In 1925 Pabst was asked by UFA* to try a unique experiment: produce a psychoanalytic movie. The original impetus came from the architect Erno Metzner, also a noted stage-set designer. Metzner suggested it to the producer, Hanns Neumann, who intended to direct it himself. The documentary department officials at UFA felt Neumann had