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Claude Chabrol, the highly respected French film director, once explained why he collaborated with a psychoanalyst on one of his films: “It's very hard, when you deal with characters, not to use the Freudian grid, because the Freudian grid is composed of signs that also apply to the cinema” (Feinstein, 1996, p. 82). Indeed, since the birth of psychoanalysis, which closely coincided with the birth of the cinema, the two fields have been closely linked. As early as 1900, a writer would describe his psychotic episode in terms of the “magic lantern” effects of the nickelodeons (Schneider, 1985). In fact, the Lumiere brothers first invented a rudimentary film projector in 1895, the same year that “Studies on Hysteria” by Breuer and Freud appeared.
Many early filmmakers recognized the close resemblance between film imagery and the work of dreams. In 1931 the American film industry was already being called a “dream factory” (Ehrenburg, 1931).
The first work, though, that seriously applied psychology to the study of the cinema was written by Harvard psychologist Hugo Munsterberg in 1916. He argued that “the photoplay” can more or less replicate the mechanisms of the mind in a way that is more convincing than typical narrative forms in storytelling. This long-standing marriage, though, between psychoanalysis and the movies was not in any way facilitated by Sigmund Freud. Freud appeared to have nothing but contempt for the cinema as an art form and showed little interest in the development of movies during his lifetime (Sklarew, 1999).
Samuel Goldwyn, legendary Hollywood producer, approached Freud in 1925 with an offer he hoped that the founder of psychoanalysis could not refuse. He offered him a $100,000 fee to consult on the film he was planning to shoot about famous love stories throughout history. Freud responded curtly and dismissively to the offer, and The New York Times of January 24, 1925, carried the following headline: “Freud Rebuffs Goldwyn: Viennese Psychoanalyst Is