The first documented viewing of a film by Freud occurred in 1907 on a rooftop at the Piazza Colonna in Rome. In a letter home he wrote that the audience was beguiled by “pictures of landscapes, Negroes of the Congo, and glacier ascents” mingled with ads. During their 1909 visit to the United States, Freud, Jung, Jones, and Ferenczi viewed silent one reelers in New York.
Ferenczi was very excited; Freud was only quietly amused. In “Freud and Film: Encounters in the Weltgeist,” in a 1999 issue of JAPA, I speculated that Freud, without attribution, incorporated knowledge of the 1895 Lumière film apparatus into his model of the mind in chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams, written in the mid- and late-1890s.
Freud refused a $100,000 offer from Samuel Goldwyn in 1925 to consult on the making of a film about famous love stories in history, beginning with Anthony and Cleopatra. Keenly sensitive to the exploitation of psychoanalysis for sensationalist ends, he rejected the offer, as reported in The New York Times: “Freud Rebuffs Goldwyn; Viennese Psychoanalyst Is Not Interested in Motion Picture Offer.”
Also in 1925, producer Hans Neumann approached Karl Abraham and Hans Sachs to collaborate on G. W. Pabst's educational and dramatic film about psychoanalysis, Geheimnisse einer Seele (Secrets of the Soul). In the film, a Viennese chemist struggles with an impulse to slit his wife's throat and has a knife phobia. This man leaves his keys on a table in his club. Another man picks up his keys and follows him home. As he fumbles in his pocket to find his keys, the other man hands him his keys saying, You have some mixed feelings about going home. When asked, “How do you know?” the other man says, I am a psychoanalyst, the first appearance of a psychoanalyst in film. He proceeds to cure his new patient, largely through dream interpretation. Freud, strongly objecting to the collaboration of Abraham and Sachs, said, “Pictorial representation of psychoanalytic abstractions is not at all possible.” He believed that nothing good or useful could come out of the project and he preferred that his name not come into it at all. The cinema project was, to Freud, an unquestionable betrayal of his theories. This “film affair” resulted in a crisis between Freud and Abraham that continued unresolved until Abraham's death.
“Freud Rebuffs Goldwyn; Viennese Psychoanalyst Is Not Interested in Motion Picture Offer.”
Nevertheless, Sachs became the film's chief consultant, explaining that film was an excellent medium for presenting dreams and wrote a monograph to accompany the film. The film was shown on Freud's 70th birthday at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Conference, which he was too ill to attend.
In contrast to Freud's view, Otto Rank said in 1914 that cinematography reminds us of the dream-work. “The uniqueness of cinematography in visually portraying psychological events calls our attention with exaggerated clarity to the fact that the interesting and meaningful problems of man's relation to himself—and faithful disturbance of this relation—finds here an imaginative representation.”
Irving Schneider focused on categorization of how psychiatrists are presented in film in a 1977 paper on “Images of the Mind: Psychiatry in the Commercial Film” in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
The psychoanalyst Harvey Greenberg wrote the first book approaching film through psychoanalytic ideas, Movies on Their Mind in 1975, and in 1994, Screen Memories. Later books include Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, edited by Smith and Kerrigan in 1987; Bertolucci's The Last Emperor: Multiple Takes edited by Sklarew, Kaufman, Spitz, and Borden; and Psychiatry in the Cinema by Glen and Krin Gabbard. Psychoanalysis and Film, edited by Glen Gabbard, is a compilation of papers from the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP). T. Jefferson Kline's Bertolucci's Dream Loom is an excellent use of psychoanalysis by a film and literature scholar Psychoanalytic Inquiry published an issue on Cinematic Visions of Psychoanalysis in 2007, and Esther Rashkin published Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture in 2008.
Andrea Sabbadini edited two volumes, The Couch and the Silver Screen: Psychoanalytic Reflections on European Cinema and Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representations of Loss in European Cinema , both evolving from the biannual European Psychoanalytic Film Festivals sponsored by the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London. A complete bibliography is available at their Web site [see box on page 11]. The fifth conference, “Screen Memories from Eastern Europe,” will be held from October 29 to November 1, 2009, featuring psychoanalysts and eminent film scholars. Andrea Sabbadini is the chair and Bernardo Bertolucci is the honorary chair.
Bruce H. Sklarew, M.D., is an associate editor of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, organizes the film programs at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and has co-edited two books on Bernardo Bertolucci.
The self-published journal, Projections, by the Forum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film began in the late '80s and continued through 2002. In 2007 it was reformulated by Ira Konigsberg, a film scholar and frequent presenter at the film programs at APsaA meetings, as editor-in-chief and myself as associate editor. Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind () exemplifies an interdisciplinary approach that includes psychoanalysis, film scholarship, neuroscience, and cognitive views in exploring film. The editorial board consists of many eminent scholars and psychoanalysts. Submission of articles is welcome at .
In 1985 the Forum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film, recently renamed the Forum for Movies and Mind (), began to present film viewings and psychoanalytic discussions in many venues including Congresses of the International Psychoanalytic Association, the National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian, the New School for Social Research, the American Film Institute, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, universities, and film festivals. Sometimes coordinating with film scholars or film historians, it has sponsored or co-sponsored more than 100 presentations. The Forum provides a clearinghouse for people programming or writing about film and has chapters in many cities.
Film discussion is an excellent vehicle for the public to engage with psychoanalytic ideas in a lively and palatable way.
The Forum began with a major conference co-sponsored with the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the New School for Social Research in New York in 1985 with Bernardo Bertolucci. These collaborations led to visits to Bertolucci film sets in Morocco, Katmandu, Seattle, Tuscany, and Paris. He later participated in two other Forum sponsored conferences and speaks of psychoanalysis as another lens on his camera. He said that he makes his films on a “dream loom.” Further information on the Forum and Projections is described in TAP 42/3. Krin Gabbard elaborated on the approaches used by film scholars to study film in TAP 29/4 and Glen Gabbard described the methods used by psychoanalysts to understand film in the IJP, 1997.
The first major program on psychoanalysis and film was initiated in the early '80s by Steven Steury of the Baltimore Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis and held in Washington. The program, which presented 16 films, was co-sponsored with the American Film Institute. Leon Levin of the Baltimore Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis organized a nearly 15-year collaboration with the Baltimore Institute of Art showing and discussing four films a year. In London, Andrea Sabbadini organizes frequent film programs with the British Psychoanalytic Institute. Other Institutes presenting film discussions are Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Boston.
Initiated in the mid-'80s when Paul Dewald was the program chair at all APsaA meetings, extensive film presentations and discussions under my chairmanship have continued at all APsaA meetings. Two or three sessions showing complete films are usually accompanied by discussion groups using clips on the same theme. Film scholars often are co-discussants with psychoanalysts. The topics have included the works of Bergman, Bertolucci, Kieslowski, Vigo, and Woody Allen; viewing film and the dream experience; Holocaust films; and loss and trauma. The New York Times, Dec. 23, 1991, covered the American Psychoanalytic Association's film program that included my oedipal interpretation of Casablanca.
Collaborations with art museums, film societies, and universities provide large lay audiences and the venue. Film discussion is an excellent vehicle for the public to engage with psychoanalytic ideas in a lively and palatable way. Psychoanalysts have studied literature because it offers portrayals of people in conflict and insight into human motivation and behavior. We have also explored content and the creative process in mythology and the arts.
Now psychoanalysis has been applied to the twentieth century's most prominent new art form—film. Glen Gabbard has said that films “serve many of the same functions for contemporary audiences as tragedy used to serve for fifth-century Greeks. Not only do they provide catharsis, they also unite audiences with their culture with their mythological dimensions in the same way that Aeschylus or Sophocles provided vision for the citizens of Athens.”