Film and Psychoanalysis

At every moment during the course of our life, our life and our activities depend upon unexpressed illusions impinging on our fantasy and our will to reach out for something which, in calm circumspection, we must acknowledge to be out of our reach. It is seldom that this basically childish, naive feature in our thinking is so clearly in evidence as it is when it expresses some essential views on art. Our will is then reflected in a pathetically grandiose light against our inability, as vividly as our pretences to understand life are when compared with our difficulty to actually live it.

In the beginning, the psychoanalytical conception of art also seemed to be naively integrated, in accordance with the early, relatively uncomplicated psychoanalytical conception of man. The leading work among the early efforts to create a psychoanalytical psychology of art and literature was Freud's Creative Writers and Day-dreaming (1908) which belongs to the same decade as “The Interpretation of Dreams”, “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life”, “Three Essays on Sexual Theory”, and “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious”, in other words, it belongs to the first, isolated, heroic and feverish phase of creating something new in psychoanalysis. Characteristic for this phase was the adaptation of Freud's most central theses on psychic life to one field after another without the cooperation of traditionally acknowledged experts whose attitude at best was skeptical, and as a rule, strictly discouraging. The fields in which psychoanalysis could offer substantial insights were the history of art, research into religion and myths, and philology, to mention only a few.

There were at that time, and still are, a number of reasons for the strong opposition raised by psychoanalytical points of view. The concept of the crucial impact of sexual impulses on the development of the individual personality is probably the first one to come to mind, and it has been the most controversial topic ever