The Wizard of Oz: Professor Marvel's Analysis of an Adolescent Girl

MGM's 1939 classic film fantasy The Wizard of Oz is generally assumed to be a simple adaptation of L. Frank Baum's (1900) children's book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Recently a graduate student1 in the humanities, exploring alternatives to gainful employment, found himself wondering about certain facts. First, the publication of Baum's book was contemporaneous with the publication of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), an event often cited as the beginning of psychoanalysis. Second, the movie was released in 1939, the year of Freud's death. Third, although the book is generally shallow and devoid of psychological sophistication, the Oz sequence in the movie has both the formal structure and some of the mechanisms of a dream: it begins with the subject in an altered state of consciousness while lying on a bed; it is dramatic and fantastic in contrast to the subject's ordinary life; it is full of “day residues” in the form of the faces of actual people transferred onto new characters; and it ends with the subject waking in bed. Finally, it was clear to him that the movie was far too sophisticated and far too terrifying to have been made for children.

These observations led the student to investigate further. He was particularly intrigued by the character who first appears in the movie as Professor Marvel, the traveling huckster whom Dorothy encounters when she tries to run away from home before the tornado hits. Frank Morgan, the actor who plays Professor Marvel, reappears in the Emerald City sequence, first as the doorman, then as a cabbie, then as the Wizard's guard, and finally as the man behind the curtain operating the “wizard” machinery. In the process of the research he conducted through his university department,2 the student unearthed the notes transcribed below. He contends that they are the case notes of an analysis of an adolescent girl, Dorothy G., conducted by one Professor Marvel.