Psychoanalysis: The 11th Muse (A Conversation)

Dr. Andrea Sabbadini:

I'd like to say a quick word about the rather cryptic title that Bernardo Bertolucci and I have chosen for tonight's conversation, that is Psychoanalysis: The 11th Muse. There are at least two general reasons for that. One is that psychoanalysis, in that title, is linked to the world of art, is linked to creativity, is linked to its importance in 20th century culture. Freud, of course, was keen to see psychoanalysis as one of the sciences, but I am not aware that he ever said that psychoanalysis was not in some way connected with the world of arts and, in fact, I think the whole of Freud's works are a testament to his sensitivity and creativity. The second reason why we chose the title is because by calling psychoanalysis “the 11th Muse,” we placed, by omission, the cinema at the 10th place, it's the 10th Muse in the Parnassus, once and for all, which I think is where cinema belongs in our century.

Bernardo Bertolucci:

Where's my couch? The Sixties were extremely important for cinema, or myself, and all my friends who started to make movies in the Sixties. We found that it was a very revolutionary moment for cinma;

it's when cinema started to think about itself. If you think of the nouvelle vague of Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, etc. I'm sure you remember that in their movies, and also in our movies-a little bit younger than them-there were always stories; we were telling a story, but underneath [that] our movies were talking about cinema; our movies were investigating about the nature of cinema. In fact, I think that cinema… which I remember two years ago, in ′95, when there were all these celebrations about the one hundred years of cinema, is more or less when I think Freud had one of the first intuitions about the dream. There is a strange but very strong parallel track between cinema and psychoanalysis. What we were doing were movies that we were very proud to know that the audience was not going to see. We were thinking, then, that if a movie