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Psychoanalysis is an intimate relationship. Two people meet regularly in a quiet room. One lies on the couch. They talk about matters of the greatest importance to at least one of them. Complete privacy is intrinsic to the process. The intimacy is not enacted but monitored, studied and used for understanding.
Privacy means exclusion. Entry is forbidden. Such a scenario inevitably arouses curiosity. What are they up to? I remember my 6-year-old son asking me why I wouldn't change places with him: I could go to his school while he would lie down on my analyst's couch. No one is above a temptation to peep through the keyhole; no one lacks oedipal wishes.
Such a prospect is also, naturally, alluring to film-makers, whose art is a sublimation (as Kieslowski affectionately portrayed in Three Colours Red ), of voyeurism and tapping in on telephone conversations. A similar point is made savagely in the perverse use of a camera in Michael Powell's powerful film, Peeping Tom . Portraying secrets is a sort of second nature to the director. And ever since Ernst Pabst's great film — Secrets of a Soul -made rather against the wishes of Freud, but with the help and advice of Abraham and Sachs, film directors have attempted, in feature film and on television, to portray the dramas of psychoanalysis. Lady in the Dark and Spellbound were two notable early examples.
Secrets of a Soul may well have been based on an actual case of a patient propelled into his symptom — he became unable to use a knife — by his unconscious wish to murder his wife, wishes intensified by his witnessing an actual murder; but the film was not a documentary. And the problems arise in just this area. My question is: could a documentary on psychoanalysis portray actual sessions without infringing damagingly on the process itself? I will suggest that it can't.
And this is frustrating. A well-made and sensitive documentary on psychoanalysis would undoubtedly do credit to a film-maker and benefit psychoanalysis, whil