Freud had an antipathy toward the usefulness of film portraying psychoanalytic ideas. He refused an offer by Samuel Goldwyn of $100,000 in 1935 to consult on a film about famous love stories and strongly advised Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs not to consult on the first psychoanalytic film, Secrets of the Soul. However, he encountered film when he saw movies in New York City in 1909, appeared in many home movies, and was sighted at an American double feature in Vienna in 1936 or 1937.
Nevertheless, despite Freud's antipathy, film and dream theory were conceived and born as fraternal twins. In December 1895, the Lumière brothers developed an apparatus for projecting images on a wall, introducing moving images as entertainment and eventually as a new art form. In Vienna in the mid-1890s, Freud elaborated on the transformation of dream thoughts into a visual representation, the dream. According to Anne Friedberg, the cinema, an apparatus that could project visual images, was in search of a theory and dream theory was in search of an apparatus. Freud's theoretical “body” and the Lumières' apparatical corpus developed with ambivalent mutual attraction.
Freud's delineation of the mental apparatus that contains the site of the dream parallels the development of the film apparatus—camera, film stock, processing, and projection. Quoting G. T. Fechner that the scene of action of dreams is different from that of waking ideational life, Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams, chapter 7 (B) that this scene “corresponds to the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus or something of the kind.” Could his cryptic flow of associations which begins with a projected virtual image followed by an apparatus, or a “form of photography,” and then the vague and ambiguous and perhaps covering up phrase “something of the kind” suggest that he did not acknowledge but incorporated into his theory the Lumière apparatus that was well known throughout the world by 1896? Did Freud here leave a message to be deciphered?
“Cinema is really a language which uses signs drawn from real life…Cinema is made from raw material woven on a dream loom.”
Like segments of ice, the dream thoughts of the latent dreams are pressured by the dream work, but after thawing, its elements are turned about, broken into fragments and jammed together in refreezing. The “film work” parallels this dream work. It transforms the “film thoughts” in the filming into visual images. The out-of-sequence actual film shots result in a disordered array like the disjointed icepack. The “film work” then uses the equivalent of condensation, displacement, symbolization, and especially visual representation. Editing weaves the visual and auditory segments of film into a believable narrative and emotional flow that become the film in a process resembling the secondary revision that results in the manifest dream.
Fellini said, “Film is a dream for the waking mind.” Bergman said that cinematography is essentially dreaming, and that as a director or creator of the picture you are a dreamer. Bertolucci said, “In dreams as in the cinema, or in cinema as in dreams one has the great liberty of using free associations to explore meaning. Cinema is really a language which uses signs drawn from real life…Cinema is made from raw material woven on a dream loom.”
Bertolucci began his first analysis in 1969. Within three years he scripted and directed three masterful films in his most productive period—The Spider's Stratagem, The Conformist, and Last Tango in Paris. He quipped that he was not analyzing himself but rather his dreams about his films with full awareness of the use of displacement. What a strong antidote to those who fear that analysis will dampen creativity.
The theme of film and dreams is addressed in the three-part workshop at the meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in January 2009. Esther Rashkin will show and discuss Star Trek: The Next Generation on Thursday, Jan. 15, at 7:30 p.m. This series tells stories about alien species, intergalactic travel, twenty-fourth century technology, and life in outer space as a way of talking about intrapsychic space, the alien world of dreams, the unconscious, and the fundamental question of what makes us human. On Friday afternoon, Adrienne Harris will show and discuss Tarnation, a film in which a gay, Jewish Texan filmed himself, his psychotic mother, and his disturbed grandparents from age 11 to 30. In this film the audience is plunged into a visual and auditory
Bruce H. Sklarew, M.D., co-edited The Last Emperor: Multiple Takes ; Bernardo Bertolucci: Interviews ; and Analyst in the Trenches: Streets, Schools and War Zones and has authored papers on film, the Annunciation, and trauma and loss in the inner city.
world of fragmentation, incoherence, and contradictory narrative fragments and images within a striking montage. The filmmaker, Jonathan Caouette, will be interviewed by Laurence Hegarty. On Saturday, afternoon following the showing of Idlewild, John Hartman will focus on a recurrent suicidal dream and on Leon Balter's exploration of dreams nestled within works of art. This mechanism deals with problems of reality including denial of a painful reality or the depiction of an antithetical view of that reality.
The fourth issue of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind (discussed in the Fall 2008 TAP) begins with Andrea Sabbadani's conversation with British film director, Mike Leigh, exploring the psychology of the artist and the actor. Yadin Dudai discusses the developing field of “neurocinematics,” the ways which film “uniquely fits, exploits, and expands the potential of a specialized cognitive machinery in the human brain.” A pioneer of science fiction studies, Eric Rabkin, takes a look at the 1941 films Dracula and Frankenstein. In discussing Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Jens Eder develops a multilevel theory of emotion elicitation for a film. Catherine Fahlenbrach analyzes the way in which sound design controls the emotional impact of image and sound on the viewer.
Future columns in TAP could further compare viewing film and the dream experience, Ingmar Bergman's use of dreams and dreamlike visuals, Bergman's final legacy, and how film programs are presented by psychoanalytic societies to professional audiences and to the lay public to elucidate psychoanalytic ideas.