Freud on Film: Psychoanalysis and Cinema

Despite Freud’s distaste for cinema—and Hollywood in particular—psychoanalytic themes became staples of popular film, especially as the sound era began in the late 1920s. In Hollywood films, psychoanalytic ideas and principles were incorporated across a range of narrative forms, but in the 1930s and 1940s two genres were prominent in explicitly depicting psychoanalytic practitioners and treatments: the psychological melodrama (sometimes critically described, often derided, as the ‘woman’s film’) and psychological thrillers (often subsumed into ‘horror’).

Selznick International Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Image source for Ingrid Bergman at a desk, taking off her spectacles

These popular genre films depicted specific character types: either the benevolent, godlike psychotherapists of melodramas such as Now, Voyager (1942) and Spellbound (1945) or the deranged clinicians of horror films like Captive Wild Woman (1943) and Shock (1945).

In Shock, psychiatrist Dr Cross (Vincent Price) tries to murder a witness through insulin shock therapy. A rapid montage of injections, surgical apparatus, records of increasing doses and calendar pages is superimposed over close-ups of the patient’s distressed face, with the disorientation of the scene enhanced through the eerie musical score built around the swelling drone of a Theremin. This musical instrument was used regularly at this time on the soundtracks of psychological horror films.

The film provoked a serious backlash from the psychiatric establishment, most vehemently from Dr Manfred Sakel, the inventor of insulin shock therapy, who publicly attacked the film for damaging trust in psychiatry and his chosen procedure in particular. Insulin shock therapy, also referred to as ‘coma therapy’, was used widely in America and Britain in the 1940s and 1950s but was subsequently discredited and disused as a treatment.

Huston worked closely with British cinematographer Douglas Slocombe and art director Stephen Grimes to create a stylised look for the film that was both historically and psychologically authentic. Huston and Slocombe committed to recreating the film’s turn-of-the-century setting, not only through authentic staging and location filming (in Austria and Germany), but also through the use of techniques and technologies from the same period.

A key example of the film’s historical grounding is its meticulous recreation of the 1887 André Brouillet painting ‘A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière’ (a lithograph of which hung above Freud’s couch), which features a ‘hysteria’ patient being presented to postgraduate students by French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.

Wellcome Collection CC-BY

While Freud was not in the original painting, he studied with Charcot in Paris at this time and was inspired by him, as the film shows. To further enhance the authenticity of the scene, it was reported in Life magazine, the actors portraying the hysteria patients were real psychiatric patients undergoing hypnosis on the studio set.

The filmmakers pioneered new cinematic techniques and technologies for representing and distinguishing between reality, dreams and reminiscences during therapy. Avoiding the perceived cliches of ‘stagey fantastic sets’ and ‘melting watches’, art director Grimes sought to ‘evolve a whole new movie language, for dream sequences’.

Grimes wished to counter these ‘stagey’ cliches of earlier films such as Spellbound (for which Salvador Dali designed the surreal dream sequences). He favoured ‘a quite hard realism’ that recreated the grainy look of Orthochromatic film stock used in early silent films from the period the film is set during. As this old film stock was no longer available, the effect was achieved by shooting on modern Eastmancolor negative and printing in black and white.  

The sound design for the film sought to enhance the distinction between material reality and the dream sequences by contrasting its more traditional score by Jerry Goldsmith with atonal electronic sequences composed and recorded by experimental Indo-Dutch composer Henk Badings. The eerie score—evoking ‘Freud's descent into a region almost as black as hell itself, man’s unconscious’—was repurposed for the psychoanalytically informed sci fi classic Alien in 1979.

Slocombe’s most innovative use of old technologies in Freud was using manipulated glass photographic plates, from the early days of photography, to create a distinct aesthetic for the scenes of patients’ regression in therapy. He explained, ‘For flashbacks I shot through a glass plate, treated to fuzz out all details except those most clearly recalled by the patient’.

This technique can be seen in the trailer for the film, where Cecily’s initial recollection of her father’s death in a hospital, is suddenly recalled, whilst under hypnosis, to have actually occurred in a ‘brothel’. 

On the film’s release, Huston promoted Freud as offering ‘something new in storytelling on the screen—to penetrate through to the unconscious of the audience’. Stopping just short of positioning the film as therapy, Huston strived to innovate a new mode of ‘storytelling’ that, challenging Freud’s scepticism about cinema, would work psychoanalytically in bringing unconscious material into the audience’s conscious minds. While many critics of the time were sceptical of these lofty aims, the filmmakers’ innovative use of material culture from the period to recreate an authentic experience was almost universally praised.