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Screen Memories: Towards a History of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis in the Movies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Michael Shortland
Michael Shortland
Affiliation:
Department for External Studies, University of Oxford, Rewley House, I Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JA, U.K.
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Extract

In his famous biography, Ernest Jones turns aside from his central theme at one point to relate a curious episode involving psychoanalysis and Hollywood, in the persons of Freud and the well-known film producer Samuel Goldwyn. Like many others in the film industry, Goldwyn was fascinated with the challenge of exploiting the association between psychoanalysis and sex on screen, but although he approached ‘the greatest love specialist in the world’ with an offer of $100 000 for his co-operation in making a movie, Freud declined and even refused to see him. To some degree, Freud's antagonism sprang from his distaste for America and its values, which he contemptuously dismissed as a blend of crude behaviourism, materialism and consumerism, epitomized in the figure of Goldwyn, whose reputation for vulgarity had preceded his arrival in Europe. But for the most part, he remained sceptical that the theories of psychoanalysis could ever be properly expressed on the silver screen, even when the attempt was made by two close acquaintances, Hanns Sachs and Karl Abraham.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , October 1987 , pp. 421 - 452
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1987

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References

My thanks to David Archard, for providing me with helpful bibliographical information at the start of my research, to Jeffrey Richards and Jill Morawski for reading and commenting on an earlier draft, and to the anonymous referees who made suggestions for improvements.

1 ‘America’, Freud once joked, ‘is a mistake; a gigantic mistake, it is true, but none the less a mistake’ (see Jones, Ernest, Sigmund Freud: Life and Works, 3 vols, London, 1953–1957, II, p. 67Google Scholar). For other examples of Freud's distaste, see Jones, Ernest, Free Associations: Memoirs of a Psychoanalyst, New York, 1959, p. 190Google Scholar; Eastman, Max, Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some Famous Friends, London, 1959, p. 129Google Scholar (‘I don't hate America, I regret it!’); Bettelheim, Bruno, Freud and Man's Soul, New York, 1984, pp. 79–80Google Scholar; and Freud, Sigmund, Civilisation and its Discontents (tr. Riviére, Joan), London, 1975, p. 53.Google Scholar

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3 That such portrayals did much to foster racist stereotypes on screen may be gathered from the interesting study by Kracauer, S., ‘National types as Hollywood presents them’ Public Opinion Quarterely, (1949), 13, pp. 53–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also in Rosenberg, D. and White, D.M. (eds), Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, News York, 1957, pp. 257–277.Google Scholar

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10 Robertson, James C., The British Board of Film Censors: Film Censorship in Britain, 1896–1950, London, 1985, p. 162Google Scholar (Jeffrey Richards kindly supplied me with this reference).

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14 Seethe report in the Daily Mirror, 16.6.1949Google Scholar. Interestingly, the controversy surrounding the Snake Pit in Italy followed a report that during the screening of the film in Rome, a 50-year-old man ‘was carried screaming from the audience into the foyer, and held down by four attendants until he could be removed to an asylum’ (Sunday Pictorial, 24.11.1949Google Scholar). The Daily Mail reported that at a showing in Brussels, ‘nine people fled from the theatre’, while a Belgian nobleman in the audience commented, ‘I'm not sure how good [Snake Pit] is amid the tension of post-war Europe’ (Daily Mail, 26.2.1949).Google Scholar

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21 See News Chronicle, 27.5.1949Google Scholar; the chairman of one hospital's management committee attacked Snake Pit loudly: ‘America's colony of synthetic-minded men and women have touched a new low. Having exhausted a seemingly endless theme of cowboys and Indians, gangsters and psychiatrists, Hollywood now exploits what is probably the most distressing of all human afflictions—mental disease.’

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25 Ibid.Sunday Express, 22.5.1949Google Scholar; Star, 19.5.1949.Google Scholar

26 Time, 20.12.1948Google Scholar; see also Observer, 22.5.1949.Google Scholar

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39 Letter from Sartre, to de Beauvoir, Simone, 10 1959Google Scholar, in Lettres au Castor et à Quelques Autres, 2 vols, Paris, 1983, II, p. 361Google Scholar; Huston, , op. cit. (30), pp. 295–298.Google Scholar

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47 For this criticism, see Financial Times, 30.8.1963Google Scholar; Hollywood Reporter, 13.12.1962Google Scholar; Films in Review, 01 1963, 44Google Scholar; and Filmblätter, 6.7.1963 (p. 549)Google Scholar. Huston himself admitted that some scenes were weak in this respect: the opening shots of Freud with his mother were, he said, ‘reminiscent of the old biographical pictures’ [op. cit. (30), p. 305].

48 See, on this, Hudson, Liam, ‘The Eureka syndrome’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 11.6.1982Google Scholar, and de Solla Price, Derek J., Science Since Babylon, New Haven, 1967, p. 47.Google Scholar

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57 The notion of Sherlock Holmes as archetypal scientist comes down to us with Holmes' own approval: see, for examples, A Study in Scarlet (chapter 2), The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, and The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier, in Doyle, Arthur Conan, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (ed. Symons, Arthur), Harmondsworth, 1981Google Scholar. That the idea lives on may be seen from Aicken, Frederick's The Nature of Science, London, 1984, p. 6Google Scholar; and Shepherd, Michael, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Dr Freud, London, 1985.Google Scholar

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82 Although many of the contributors to Shinn, and Whitley, (eds), op. cit. (80), Expository ScienceGoogle Scholar, no longer conceive of ‘popularization’ as a one-way flow to passive, atomistic audiences, that process itself is thought of mainly in terms of knowledge; see, for example, the remarks of Richard Whitley, introducing the collection, on p. 4. Some of the problems with this approach are discussed in Goldsmith, Maurice, The Science Critic, London, 1986, especially chapter 1.Google Scholar

83 I. A. Richards quoted in Srevenson, Ralph and Debrix, J.R., The Cinema as Art, Harmondsworth 1969, p. 30.Google Scholar