SOURCE: Friedberg, Anne. “An Unheimlich Maneuver between Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: Secrets of a Soul.” In The Films of G. W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema, edited by Eric Rentschler, pp. 41-51. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Friedberg explores the relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis in light of Pabst's experiences making Secrets of a Soul.]

“Mass culture is psychoanalysis in reverse.”

—Leo Löwenthal

The coincident birthdates of psychoanalysis and the cinema have frequently been celebrated as “no accident.” Freud's theory of the unconscious, his “science” of the psyche (die Seele),¹ was, from the start, a theory in search of an apparatus. Yet the cinema, an apparatus which could reproduce and project specular images, was, from its beginnings, an apparatus in search of a theory. Historians who accept metaphors of incipience, birth, parturition, and infancy for the two quite separate “bodies” of psychoanalysis and cinema—one a theoretical “body,” the other an apparatical corpus which only developed its theoretical parasites when well into adolescence—might also want to chart a further history of these figures. As both “bodies” developed, there were moments of mutual attraction, occasions of intercourse and isolation, in what has remained a frequently ambivalent and largely undocumented affair. Freud, who sired and literally engendered his theories, was a protective and possessive father. The cinema, polymorphously conceived, a culmination of inventions and marketing strategies on an international scale, was much more promiscuous in its outreach.

In this context, G. W. Pabst's 1926 film, Secrets of a Soul (Geheimnisse einer Seele), is one such moment of encounter, a chapter in the still unwritten and untheorized metahistory of psychoanalysis and cinema.² Shown at Freud's seventieth birthday celebration in Berlin, Secrets of a Soul was an occasion for an unprecedented collaboration between the quite separate worlds of film production and psychoanalysis. In working on Secrets of a Soul, the filmmaker Pabst was pulled into the carefully-guarded realm of psychoanalysis. Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs, both members of Freud's exclusive “circle” of seven, were pulled into the brash mass-cultural world of the cinema.³ The exchange between them, a transference of sorts, provides a unique case study of the reactions of one institution to another.

A CASE STUDY

The production circumstances for Secrets of a Soul provide rare insight into Freud's own attitude toward the cinema: a reaction-formation of defense and suspicion. It was not Freud's first encounter. The much-celebrated exchange between Freud and the master of Fehlleistung himself, Hollywood producer and self-styled studio mogul, Samuel Goldwyn, provides an earlier indication of Freud's dismissiveness toward any cinematic attempts to appropriate his theories. Goldwyn offered Freud $100,000 to cooperate on a film “depicting scenes from the famous love scenes of history, beginning with Antony and Cleopatra.”⁴ Freud refused to discuss Goldwyn's offer. According to Hanns Sachs, who reported their exchange in a letter circulated to Freud's official circle, Freud's telegram of refusal created more of a furor in New York than the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams.⁵

In contrast to the Goldwyn proposal, the project which became Secrets of a Soul involved a more substantial confrontation. The proposition came from Hans Neumann of Ufa—from Berlin, then, not from Hollywood. Whether or not the original impetus for the film stemmed from Ernö Metzner (a point obscured in most accounts),⁶ it was Hans Neumann who approached Karl Abraham, the founder of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society and the recently elected President of the International Association of Psychoanalysis, with a detailed project for a film about psychoanalysis. Ufa, at this point in the mid-twenties, was certainly engaged in the campaign to have the cinema considered as a legitimate art, a product of high culture. (The Ufa division responsible for Secrets of a Soul was the Kulturfilm-Abteilung.) Significantly coincident with the legitimation crusade by cinema enthusiasts, psychoanalysts also campaigned for the legitimacy of the “science” of the unconscious. In February 1925, Karl Abraham wrote to Freud that a lecture he would give at the Berlin Society for Gynecology and Obstetrics would be the “first official recognition of psychoanalysis in Germany.”⁷

The correspondence of Freud and Karl Abraham between June and December of 1925, details, along with news of Abraham's progressing illness, Freud's vehement distrust of the cinema. The timing here may not quite be coincidental: Abraham took to his bed just after his visit from Hans Neumann, as if the film idea, not the bronchitis he caught on his lecture tour in Holland, were the agent of fatal infection. Abraham died that year on Christmas Day, and the disagreements he had with Freud, particularly about the “film matter” [Filmsache], were never resolved. But one thing from the letters seems evident: the structure of the disagreement between Freud and Abraham was not new to them. The “film affair,” as Abraham called it, was indeed a repetition of earlier interactions, of previous disputes about discipleship. Whereas Abraham had been the first to label Jung and Rank as “deviants,” Freud had to be convinced to distrust them. The “film affair” reversed this structure. Freud was suspicious and Abraham reassuring. The cinema project was, to Freud, an unquestionable betrayal of his theories. A brief précis of their exchange bears this out.

On June 7, 1925, Abraham wrote a long letter to Freud explaining Neumann's proposal. Laced with his own doubts about the project, Abraham's letter defensively anticipates Freud's sense of protective custody.

I need hardly mention that this kind of thing is not really up my street; nor that this type of project is typical of our times and that it is sure to be carried out, if not with us, then with other people who know nothing about it.⁸

Abraham outlines the offer:

The difference between this straightforward offer compared with the American Goldwyn is obvious. The plan for the film is as follows: the first part is to serve as an introduction and will give impressive examples illustrating repression, the unconscious, the dream, parapraxis, anxiety, etc. The director of the company who knows some of your papers is, for instance, very enthusiastic about the analogy of the invader used in the lectures to illustrate repression and resistance. The second part will present a life history from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis and will show the treatment and cure of neurotic symptoms.⁹

“The analogy of the invader” was taken from the lectures that Freud gave at Clark University in 1909, lectures that were intended to explain the theory of the unconscious in simple language to an American audience. Freud metaphorized the unconscious as a lecture hall and illustrated repression as the need to kick out an audience member who makes a disturbance. If Neumann was “enthusiastic” about this analogy, it was because it had proved so successful in translating Freud's theories to an easily understood, accessible level. If the Clark lectures helped establish Freud's reputation in America, Neumann must have calculated that the “Worcester-simile,” as it came to be known, would work for an equally simple-minded film audience.

In addition to the film, Neumann proposed an accompanying pamphlet, “easily comprehensible and non-scientific,” to be sold through the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. Despite his avowed hesitancies, Abraham seemed somewhat seduced by the idea. He includes his own plans for the film.

My idea is not to describe psychoanalysis systematically but to give examples from everyday life and to develop the theory around them. … Our influence should extend into every detail in order to avoid anything that might discredit us in any way.¹⁰

Freud's reply was swift and uncompromising. On June 9th, he wrote back quite directly: “I do not feel happy about your magnificent project.” The following succinct statement of hesitation illustrates Freud's attitude toward the cinema:

My chief objection is still that I do not believe that satisfactory plastic representation of our abstractions is at all possible. … The small example that you mentioned, the representation of repression by means of my Worcester simile, would make an absurd rather than an instructive impact.¹¹

(emphasis mine)

Freud frequently sought topological metaphors to describe and make more tangible the otherwise abstract concept of the unconscious, but he never appealed to the cinema as an apt analog.

Freud's “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’” (written in the fall of 1924, published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse in 1925) is curiously coincident with these debates about a film project.¹² In this short piece, Freud chooses the model of the “Mystic-Writing-Pad” (der Wunderblock), a recently marketed writing contraption with a thin layer of celluloid over a waxed surface, as a “concrete representation” of the perceptual apparatus of the mind. He dismisses auxiliary apparatuses intended to substitute for “the improvement or intensification of our sensory functions … spectacles, photographic cameras, ear trumpets.”¹³ Devices used to aid memory, a category which could include the cinema, are, Freud claims, similarly imperfect, “since our mental apparatus accomplishes precisely what they cannot: it has an unlimited receptive capacity for new perceptions and nevertheless lays down as permanent—even though not unalterable—memory traces of them.”¹⁴ While Freud's prompt response to Abraham illustrates his vehement distrust of the cinema to represent his abstractions, “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’” seems to demonstrate that he was still thrashing about for suitable concrete illustrations.

As the correspondence between Freud and Abraham continued, the positions solidified. Abraham supplied progress reports in July. By then it was clear that Sachs, the Berlin-based, Vienna-born analyst, was as involved as Abraham.

Sachs and I believe that we have every guarantee that the matter will be carried out with genuine seriousness. In particular, we think we have succeeded in principle in presenting even the most abstract concepts. Each of us had an idea concerning these and they complemented each other in the most fortunate way.¹⁵

And in August:

The work on the film is progressing well. Sachs is devoting himself to it and is proving very competent, and I am also trying to do my share.¹⁶

The last letters between Freud and Abraham, in October and November, address their differences directly:

You know, dear Professor, that I am unwilling to enter once again into a discussion of the film affair [Filmangelegenheit]. But because of your reproach of harshness (in your circular letter), I find myself once more in the same position as on several previous occasions. … I advanced an opinion which is basically yours as well but which you did not admit to consciousness.¹⁷

Freud, although he does not agree that he is in unconscious concordance with Abraham, is conciliatory in what was his last letter to Abraham.

It does not make a deep impression on me that I cannot convert myself to your point of view in the film affair [Filmsache]. There are a good many things that I see differently and judge differently. … With that let us close the argument about something that you yourself describe as a trifle.¹⁸

If the differences between Abraham and Freud were not enough of a disturbance to Sachs and Abraham as co-scenarists, Sachs also was distraught by an article by R. J. Storfer, the director of the Verlag, which had criticized the film project. Sachs had discovered that Storfer and Siegfried Bernfeld, another Viennese analyst, had also written a film script that they were trying to interest other film companies in. Storfer and Bernfeld discussed their project with Abraham who informed them that his contract with Ufa stipulated that no other “official” Verlag-supported film could be made within a period of three years.¹⁹

The opening titles of Secrets of a Soul credit the manuscript as a collaboration between two film-world talents, Hans Neumann and Colin Ross, with technical advice from two psychoanalysts, Dr. Karl Abraham and Dr. Hanns Sachs. Sachs wrote the monograph to accompany the film. The thirty-one-page pamphlet describes the case study in the film and provides an introduction to many of the psychoanalytic concepts it attempts to illustrate. The pamphlet has separate sections to explain: I. Fehlhandlungen (“slips” or parapraxes); II. Die Neurose—in this case, a phobia and a compulsion (Zwangsimpuls); and III. Die Traumdeutung—the theoretical background to dream interpretation. In his closing commentary, Sachs acknowledges Freud's objections and admits:

No single film can explain the entire scope of psychoanalysis, nor can a single case be used to illustrate all clinical manifestations. A great deal was discarded from the presentation when it was too difficult or too scientific for the general public, or unsuitable for film portrayal.²⁰

NICHT FREUDLOS: A FILM WITH FREUD

Secrets of a Soul was not the first film to deal with serious psychological problems nor the first to attempt cinematic representation of dreams or mental phenomena, but it was the first film that directly tried to represent psychoanalytic descriptions of the etiology of a phobia and the method of psychoanalysis as treatment.

In the early fall of 1925, Hans Neumann asked G. W. Pabst to direct the project on psychoanalysis.²¹ Pabst had just completed The Joyless Street—Die freudlose Gasse—to mixed critical acclaim. He was now being asked to direct, indirectly, a film “mit Freud.”

Aside from this rather obvious intertextual pun on Pabst's own filmography,²²Secrets of a Soul also had a number of unintentional but nevertheless significant linguistic twists in casting. Werner Krauss, who had played the Döppelganger in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920)—madman in the inner story, benevolent doctor in the framing story—was now cast as the neurotic analysand.²³ Krauss's career trajectory, initially at least, took him from Caligari to Freud.²⁴ The doctor-to-patient transference in Krauss's filmography seems further ironized by the choice of actor who was to play the analyst²⁵ in the film: an actor from the Moscow Art Theatre, Pavel Pavlov.²⁶ Pabst's assistant director, Mark Sorkin, took classes from Sachs on psychoanalysis so that he could tutor Pavlov.²⁷ That same year, in the Soviet Union, Vsevold Pudovkin was at work on a film that also attempted a straightforward cinematic appropriation of psychological theories. Yet Pudovkin's film, Mechanics of the Brain, was about the work of Freud's mightiest theoretical opponent, the physiologist Ivan Pavlov.

Abraham and Sachs's script had to contend with the essential problem of translating a “talking cure” into a silent series of images. Secrets presents a case study—the origins of a knife phobia and its treatment through analysis. Pabst's own relation to knives also seems to demand some analysis. Instead of a phobia of knives, Pabst seems to have had an obsessive fixation on them, a genuine Messerzwang. Knives play significant roles not only in Secrets, but in a number of Pabst films, including Pandora's Box, The Threepenny Opera, and Paracelsus.

Secrets of a Soul is a film narrative with the structure of a detective film, the psychoanalyst as a sort-of Sherlock Jr. who witnesses each image as the analysand retells the events leading up to his nightmare and his resulting phobia. The analyst must then deduce and decode the origins of the client's phobia. Geheimnisse uses dream analysis as the central hermeneutical tool of its narrative; the dream is a cinematic attempt at direct pictorial transcription of psychic mechanisms, a key to the locked room of the unconscious.

A quick comparison with Buster Keaton's 1924 film, Sherlock Junior, illustrates how such analytic narratives entail the skills of film analysis. In the diegetic world of Sherlock Junior, Sherlock is an actual film spectator, a movie projectionist who studies to become a detective. He falls asleep and “dreams” the solution to his case. Keaton, more directly, dreams a film in which he projects himself as the heroic protagonist. The film he views is a wish-fulfillment, from which he could conduct his own deductions about behavior. The dream in Sherlock Junior is structured like a film, the spatial discontinuities of each abrupt shot change become the source of comedy. Each cut displaces the hero from one setting to another. He sits on a park bench, the shot changes, Keaton is suddenly in a landscape without a bench and falls to the ground. Secrets of a Soul, unlike the Keaton film, makes no direct reference to the apparatical construction of the cinema. But both films use the dream as a key to unlock the narrative mysteries. Just as Keaton doubles for the film spectator who deduces a conclusion from a series of images, the psychoanalyst in Secrets doubles for the role of a film analyst who rereads and hence interprets the film-dream image.

A brief description of the film's narrative and its construction demonstrates that it addresses its spectator in a quite sophisticated fashion.²⁸Secrets can be separated into the following sections: Pre-dream—coincident events that lead up to the nightmare; The Dream; Post-dream—the series of parapraxes which demonstrate the phobia and compulsion; The Analysis; and The Epilogue/Cure.

I. PRE-DREAM

The opening shot (in the German print) is of Werner Krauss's face distorted in a small round shaving mirror. In crosscut fashion, a spatial separation is established between the husband's bedroom, where he shaves by the window, and the wife's bedroom, where she brushes her hair in front of her vanity. After some crosscutting and matched continuity on the door between their rooms, the man exits his room and enters hers. The wife playfully attempts to kiss her husband and is rebuffed by the shaving cream on his face. She shows him a straggly tuft of hair on her neck, indicating that she needs it to be trimmed. As he applies shaving cream and begins to shave his wife's neck, they are interrupted. The interruption occurs literally as this chain of images is abruptly intercut with an image from a third space of the neighbor opening her shutters and screaming. This is followed by the first intertitle: “Help!!!”²⁹ Although the film is silent, the scream for help is vividly demonstrated. As the man begins to reapply the razor, he notices that he has cut his wife's neck.

Circumstances continue to conspire toward the husband's disturbance: on his way to work, he sees a crowd has gathered across the street, ambulances and police. His neighbors are talking, a title indicates: “Last night, with the razorblade he———.”³⁰ The husband goes to his workplace, a chemical laboratory, and registers some distress in reaction to a point-of-view shot of his letter opener, the blade of which he avoids using. A woman and her young daughter visit the laboratory; after he gets up from his desk to give the little girl some candy, the girl's mother and the female lab assistant exchange knowing glances, as if to laugh at him. That evening when he returns home, his wife shows him an article in the newspaper, which we assume has to do with the crime next door. It upsets him and he throws the newspaper into the fire.

A police inspector comes to their house to inquire about the crime. The man answers that he only learned about it when he heard the “help” cry that morning. After the inspector leaves, the wife shows her husband an exotic gift and a letter sent by her cousin to announce his imminent arrival. The cousin's letter is accompanied by photos and another gift, a saber-like sheathed sword. The photos of the cousin show him standing quite erect wearing a pith helmet of phallic proportions. The husband's attention to the saber is intensified by a point-of-view shot of the sword. He brandishes the sword briefly and then puts it down hastily.

When they retire for bed that evening, the wife seems disappointed when her husband bids her good night at the door to her bedroom and then retires to his room. A series of crosscut shots of the husband-in-his-bed and the wife-in-her-bed are intercut with images of a storm that is brewing outside on their patio. Then a title indicates: “The Dream.”³¹

In terms of Freudian dream analysis, all of the narrative events that have happened up until this dream, furnish day-residues which contribute to the logic of the husband's disturbance. Each of these circumstances—the murder, his guilt over cutting his wife's neck, the gossiping neighbors, the two women laughing at him in his workplace, the visit by the police inspector, the imminent arrival of his wife's cousin, and the gifts of the fertility statue and the sword—all become part of the dreamwork.

The images from the dream are intercut with images of the man sleeping fitfully as lightning flashes over his face. There is a linguistic significance to the coincidence of the storm and the cousin's arrival that is apparent only in the German-language print or to those familiar with the sounds of German. Later as the man is describing the dream to the analyst, he says: During the night before the outbreak of my illness, there was a bad storm [ein schweres Unwetter].³² Here, ein schweres Unwetter becomes easily conflated with the disturbing arrival of the cousin, der Vetter.

II. THE DREAM

The dream sequence was designed by Ernö Metzner and shows off the cinematography of Guido Seeber. This sequence of seventy-five shots uses many camera-tricks—superimpositions, model-shots, stop-action and reverse-motion—to illustrate the condensations and displacements of the dreamwork.³³ Unlike the previous progression of images, the dream is not constructed with the logic of continuity editing, but follows a purely associative sequence, associations that are not immediately apparent. Lotte Eisner maintains that the dream sequence would not have been possible were it not for the lessons of expressionism: “In this style Pabst discovered a means of giving a luminous and unreal relief to objects or people, of deforming architectural perspective, and of distorting the relative proportion of objects.”³⁴

While only a shot-by-shot breakdown of the seventy-five shots in the dream would completely describe its structure, it can be reduced to its basic elements: four associative sequences interrupted by shots of the husband sleeping fitfully. In this sequence, all of the images have dark backgrounds. We will see many of these images again later in the film when the dream is retold to the analyst, but they are repeated with a whitened background, the actions made more visible.

The first eighteen shots of the dream establish, through crosscutting, an image of the cousin sitting in a tree wearing his pith helmet. The husband looks up to him from the patio to his house and frantically tries to get back inside the house. The cousin aims an imaginary gun at the husband and, through stop-action dissolve, a real gun appears. The husband then jumps into the black space of the air, and, in point-of-view shots, we see the patio getting smaller as the husband floats upward. The cousin aims and shoots and in point-of-view shots the patio gets larger as the husband falls to the ground. Shot 19 shows the husband in bed fitfully tossing and turning.

The dream resumes (shots 20-43) with a crosscut of three images: a cave-like space filled with a large version of the cousin's fertility statue gift; the husband against a black background as a crossing gate comes down, preventing him from moving forward; and a superimposition of two electric trains, crossing in perpendicular directions, with, in another layer of superimposition, the cousin waving from the window of a moving train. This sequence concludes as the crossing gate goes up and the man walks toward us dressed in a bowler hat with a cane. An expressionistic cardboard town pops up from an empty black space. A tower spirals upward in front of the town. The tower is shaped as a phallus, with its top resembling the cousin's helmet. The husband looks up to the top of the tower where bells are ringing. The ringing bells become superimposed with the heads of the three women—his wife, his lab assistant, and the woman who visited with her child.³⁵

This second dream segment is interrupted with shots (44-47) of the husband tossing and turning; the wife asleep and then waking; the husband tossing and turning. The dream resumes with an intercut sequence (shots 48-64) of another complex superimposition (a courtroom-like trial superimposing a shadow of drums, the wife showing the cut-mark on her neck, a group of men) with shots of the husband hanging from the bars of another gate which prevents him from moving forward.

The dream is interrupted again (shots 65-67 show the husband in bed) and then resumes (shots 68-76) with its final segment. The husband, in a laboratory-like room, goes to a high window to look out. In counter-shot, the husband sees a dark pool with lily pads. Then, in reverse angle, we see the husband looking through barred windows. In the counter-shot, a small boat with the wife and the cousin floats into the darkened pool. The wife pulls a baby doll out of the water—a somewhat unnatural movement because it is pulled out of the water in reverse motion. The husband watches this through the barred window. The wife and cousin then embrace and the wife gives the cousin the doll. In the lab the husband runs for a knife, flails about and then begins stabbing at a superimposed image of his wife. He repeats the rutting gestures of this stabbing until she disappears.

III. POST-DREAM

After the dream, the husband begins to exhibit a variety of paraparaxes. The next morning when he begins to shave he “accidentally” drops his razor on the floor and decides instead to go to the barber. Then, while he is at the laboratory demonstrating something with a test tube, the phone rings. His female assistant answers it and when she informs him that his wife wants him to know that her cousin has arrived, he abruptly drops the test tube and it shatters on the floor.

When he returns home that evening, the wife and cousin show him some old photos. In a reaction shot to one of the photographs, of the three of them as children, the husband is visibly troubled. As they dine, he is afraid to touch his knife, asking his wife to carve the roast. Disturbed by the knives, he suddenly excuses himself, leaves the house and goes to his club. After several drinks, he exits without his key. He is observed by the doctor who follows him home, and in front of his gate tells him: “You have a reason for not wishing to enter your house.” And as if to explain how he knows this: “It is part of my profession.”³⁶ When the husband returns home, his wife greets him but as he embraces her he stares repeatedly at the knife on the table and at the back of her neck. His hand reaches out for the knife, and only with great effort does he resist the urge to pick it up. Quite distraught, he again leaves the house.

As the evidence of his disturbance accumulates, it has become apparent that, since his dream, the husband has a fear of knives and also a compulsion to kill his wife. For refuge, he goes to his mother's house. His concerned mother asks: “Don't you know anybody who could help you?” As if in response, her question is followed by an image of the smiling doctor with a superimposed key. After locating the doctor through his club, the man goes to the doctor to confess his compulsion to kill his wife. The doctor tells him it is only a symptom of a more complicated malady and that there is a method—Psychoanalyse—that can treat this kind of disease.

Before the analysis officially begins, the husband is told he must move out of his house and in with his mother. (As soon as it becomes apparent that the husband has left his wife, the cousin also moves to a hotel.) When the film was first shown at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society's celebration of Freud's seventieth birthday in May 1926, a member of the Society objected to this part of the film's portrait of psychoanalytic treatment. If every man must leave his wife and live with his mother, as the character in the film is told to do, the analyst worried, no one would consent to psychoanalysis.³⁷

IV. THE ANALYSIS

The hundred or so shots that compose the scene in the doctor's office, intercutting dream, symbolic representation, early childhood memories, and the retelling of everyday events with the interaction between the analyst and analysand, form a montage strategy quite unlike the “invisible editing” that had been applauded in Pabst's The Joyless Street. This alteration between couch-based shots and the pictorial renditions of the husband's dream and memories, creates for the viewer an entry into complex character subjectivity.

A brief analysis of the shot sequence of the retold dream illustrates that Pabst was employing one of his most complicated uses of montage, a strategy that would have been applauded by Eisenstein, if not in ideological terms, at least in formal ones. Yet many of the images from the dream and retold narrative are left unanalyzed, and this excess of meaning forms, almost, an intellectual overtone.

An enumeration of the variety of shot types will help clarify the montage alternation between: 1) Symbolic representations, fantasies, or perhaps figures of speech: for example, as if to symbolize their marriage and desire for children, we see the husband and wife against a white background, planting a small tree. A dark and empty room becomes, through stop-action dissolve, filled with nursery furniture. The husband also tells of imagining his wife in compromising positions and we see shots of her in a harem-like place, reclining with the helmeted cousin, smoking on a long pipe. 2) Childhood memories: the photograph that upset the husband triggers his memory of a childhood Christmas with an electric train, the occasion when his wife, as a young girl, gave her baby doll to the cousin. 3) Retold dream images: repetitions of the dream, but altered slightly in sequence. 4) Retold narrative events: some of the earlier events or interactions repeated—the cry for help, the neighbors talking, the woman laughing in the lab—are shown now isolated against a white background.

In the sequencing of these images, the analyst is being “told” what we as spectators “see.” The analyst is positioned as a fictional surrogate for the film spectator who performs an interpretation of the logic of each image and its sequence. But it is not apparent until the psychoanalytic sessions begin that there is an implicit equation between dream analysis and film analysis in this repetition of images from the dream and from otherwise quotidian events. As film spectators, we have just seen these images. This analytic repetition, rereading, is not unlike the critical-theoretical activity of film analysis, in which one interprets images and the associative logic of their sequence. Yet the equation remains implicit. Secrets of a Soul does not make the activity of film analysis at all explicit to the viewer who reviews the dream and narrative images and must recontextualize and reanalyze their significance.

What seems most striking about this implicit equation is how many of the images remain unanalyzed and uninterpreted. This overload of signification creates a curious excess in the film, perhaps more like a semiotic undertow than an intellectual overtone. While it suggests that the viewer must resee what has been seen before, the absence of analysis of some of the images also becomes a striking repression. Many elements that are made quite explicit in the visual language of the film—the phallic nature of the cousin's helmet and the shattered test-tube, the shadow of the cousin's phallic helmet on the wife's womb—are not analyzed in the verbal exchange between the analyst and analysand. But these elements are apparent to the film spectator who is also deducing the logic behind the man's phobia. The spectator of Secrets of a Soul is positioned as a more astute psychoanalyst than the fictional surrogate. The narrative pleasure offered by the film is in the act of hermeneutical detection, the act of psychoanalysis. In short, it is a film which equates the boons of psychoanalytic treatment and cure with the skills of film analysis.

Certainly, Secrets did not attempt to contend with some of the more controversial foundations of Freud's theories of infantile psycho-sexual development, and chose instead to depict the concept of the unconscious and the therapeutic powers of psychoanalysis to treat mild neuroses such as this case of phobia and compulsion. The analysis demonstrated is classically Freudian; the film embodies the structure of dream analysis as Freud intended it to be performed. Yet here the “talking cure” is successfully reduced to silent images. An analysis is conducted, not on the speech of the analysand but on images that Pabst provides. Ironically, the American critic, Harry Alan Potamkin, would write of Pabst's “psychologism” that “his own ‘suppressed desire’ was more social than Freudian.”³⁸

V. EPILOGUE/CURE

The “cure” achieved at the end of the film, is not unlike the cure supplied by other film narrative endings—a final frame in which the family unit, here with the addition of a child, embraces happily. The epilogue is idyllically set in a countryside more reminiscent of a tranquil landscape in German romanticism than the twisted chiaroscuro of expressionism. The ending functions as straightforward wish-fulfillment, not unlike the tacked-on conclusion of F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann, 1924) a compensation for all that has been suffered in the course of the narrative. Here the endangered marriage has been repaired, consummated—and, indeed, blessed with a child. If Secrets of a Soul was to be an advertising film for psychoanalysis, this final image of the happy family unit was the product being sold.

SECRETS MADE PUBLIC

For Hanns Sachs and Karl Abraham, the ambition behind Secrets of a Soul was to make public the secrets of psychoanalysis, to extol its curative virtues. For Hans Neumann and G. W. Pabst, the film provided an occasion to use a psychoanalytic case study as a cinematic narrative, to exploit the hermeneutic similarities between the work of psychoanalysis and the act of cinema spectatorship. While Freud's reaction to Secrets of a Soul remains unknown (it was not recorded by Jones, nor mentioned in any of Freud's own papers), his hostility toward the cinematic appropriation of his theories suggests a vigorous, almost Luddite, resistance to the tools of modernity. Nevertheless, Secrets of a Soul remains the first film to use psychoanalysis as a narrative device and it was, if not Freud's first, certainly his last unheimlich maneuver with the cinema.

Notes

1. As Bruno Bettelheim points out in “Freud and the Soul” (an essay which first appeared in The New Yorker, 1 March 1982, and later became part of Freud and Man's Soul [New York: Knopf, 1983]), English translations of Freud excise most of his references to the soul (70-78). Both Strachey and Brill translate the German word Seele as psyche or as “mind,” rather than soul, eliminating much of its associative meaning. In all Standard Edition translations, for example, der seelische Apparat, is translated as mental apparatus. If Freud had meant “of the intellect” or “of the mind,” Bettelheim asserts, he would have used the word “geistig” (72). “Freud never faltered in his conviction that it was important to think in terms of the soul when trying to comprehend his system, because no other concept would make equally clear what he meant; nor can there be any doubt that he meant soul, and not the mind, when he wrote ‘seelisch’” (73). The German word Seele carries the spiritual connotations of the word “soul,” a word that is generally omitted from more scientific-sounding English translations of Freud.

2. The English-language title of the film retains much of what Bettelheim claims is lost from most translations of Freud. However, the title seems to give little indication of these psychoanalytic references to English-language viewers who are unaware of Freud's emphasis on the “soul.” Geheimnisse also contains the root word Heim, as in heimlich (the concealed, the withheld, the PRIVATE), a key word in Freud's lengthy analysis of “Das Unheimliche.” This 1919 essay explored the similarities in signification between heimlich and unheimlich, words that should have opposite contradictory meanings, but instead come to mean the same thing—familiar and yet concealed. Translated as “The Uncanny,” the essay becomes another example of the linguistic loss of root words and connotations in translation. There are two previous English-language articles on the film: Bernard Chodorkoff and Seymour Baxter, “Secrets of a Soul: An Early Psychoanalytic Film Venture,” American Imago 31.4 (Winter 1974): 319-334; Nick Browne and Bruce McPherson, “Dream and Photography in a Psychoanalytic Film: Secrets of a Soul,” Dreamworks 1.1 (Spring 1980): 35-45.

3. Freud had given six of his disciples—Rank, Eitingon, Ferenczi, Jones, Abraham, Sachs—each a ring set with a semiprecious stone. The seven became a cabal-like group of intimates, corresponding regularly with circulating letters. By 1926, Rank and Ferenczi had broken with the circle, Abraham had died, and only Jones, Sachs, Eitingon, and Freud were left. While Sachs describes the protocols of the circle of seven, he makes no mention of the Geheimnisse project in his memoir of Freud, Freud, Master and Friend (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944).

4. See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 3:114. Jones gets a few of the details wrong in his account. Perhaps as evidence of his faint knowledge of the film world, he refers to Goldwyn as a film director. Jones also writes that the finished film was screened in Berlin in January 1926, but it was not screened until 24 March 1926 at the Gloria-Palast in Berlin.

5. Ibid., 114.

6. Chodorkoff and Baxter claim (319) that Ernö Metzner suggested the idea to Hans Neumann, who intended to direct the film himself. Their source for this information was the unpublished biography by Michael Pabst. They also describe how “documentary department officials” at Ufa felt that Neumann had “insufficient experience” and instead chose Pabst because The Joyless Street had impressed them.

7. A Psychoanalytic Dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham 1907-1926, ed. Hilda C. Abraham and Ernst L. Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 380. The German edition of the correspondence can be found in: Sigmund Freud, Karl Abraham, Briefe 1907-1926, ed. Hilda C. Abraham und Ernst L. Freud (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1965), 355-371.

8. Letters of Freud and Abraham, 380.

9. Ibid., 382-383.

10. Ibid., 383.

11. Ibid., 384.

12. “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic-writing-pad,’” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth, 1953-1973), 19:227-232. [“Notiz über den ‘Wunderblock,’” Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago, 1940-1952), 14:3-8.]

13. Ibid., 228.

14. Ibid., 228.

15. Letters of Freud and Abraham, 389.

16. Ibid., 392.

17. Ibid., 398.

18. Ibid., 399. Freud refers to the matter as the “Filmsache.” While Abraham's term in his letter of October 27, 1925, “die Filmangelegenheit,” more directly meant “affair.” In the English translation, the translators continue to refer to it as “film affair.”

19. See Jones, Life and Work, 3:115.

20. Hanns Sachs, Psychoanalyse. Rätsel des Unbewussten (Berlin: Lichtbild-Bühne, 1926), 29. Translation by A. F.

21. Lee Atwell's account in G. W. Pabst (Boston: Twayne, 1977), 37-42, describes the origin of the project without mentioning the correspondence between Abraham and Freud. Atwell attributes the project's origin to Pabst, who out of his interest in Freud's work, and his acquaintance with a Dr. Nicholas Kaufmann, contacted Neumann and met Sachs and Abraham. Atwell also places Pabst in collaboration with Colin Ross and Neumann, as if Pabst had been involved in the scriptwriting stage of the production. The Chodorkoff and Baxter account (in American Imago), places Pabst's entrance to the project much later, in the fall of 1925, after, as the summer of correspondence between Freud and Abraham indicates, the script had been written.

22. The American critic and correspondent for Close Up, Harry Alan Potamkin, made this pun in his 1933 article, “Pabst and the Social Film,” published in the literary journal Hound and Horn. Of Pabst he wrote: “He was as yet the humanitarian, and not the ‘psychologist,’ in the ‘freudlose Gasse’ (the street without Freud.)” This essay is reprinted in The Compound Cinema, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York and London: Teachers College, 1977), 410-421.

23. In the German-language version, the man is not given a name. In the English-language version, his name is Martin Fellman.

24. Kracauer's well-known account of German cinema in the Weimar years is titled From Caligari to Hitler. In this case, Werner Krauss went from playing the duplicitous Doctor Caligari, both benevolent and mad, to playing, in Secrets, a man maddened and sent to a benevolent doctor. Both films are narratives of cure, with a similar hermeneutic structure, detective work that involves the interpretation of data as symptoms and clues.

25. In the German-language version of the film, the doctor remains unnamed, while in the English-language version, the doctor is named Dr. Orth. Orth in Greek means correction of deformities, as in orthodontia, orthopedics; in short, Dr. Cure.

26. “Pawel Pawlow” in the German print. Atwell (41) maintains that Pabst had been impressed with Pavlov especially in Robert Wiene's Raskolnikow (1923).

27. Mark Sorkin was assistant director for numerous Pabst films. Sorkin, who spoke fluent Russian, translated his lessons from Sachs for Pavlov, who spoke only Russian and knew nothing of Freud's work. Pavlov performed so convincingly that, according to Atwell, a group of American therapists contacted him for a lecture (Atwell, 41-42).

28. A few minor differences in the available English-language and German-language prints also bear some description. In the English version of Secrets, the film opens with an image of Freud, as if his silent outward gaze provided indication of his sanction. The second image in the English print is of Dr. Orth, writing case notes at his desk. These shots are not unlike the shots in Caligari as Werner Krauss sits at his desk writing case notes. They are designed to place the analyst-character as a fictional surrogate, sponsored by Freud. The German print opens without the direct visual appeal to Freud's authorization. Both prints begin with explanatory titles which mention psychoanalysis and the teachings of “Universität Prof. Dr. Sigmund Freud.” The first image in the German print is the razor being sharpened. Although the variance between these two versions is relatively small, the difference between them amounts to whether there is a framing story or not. The English-language opening recalls the framing story of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. Dr. Orth writes case notes, framing the inner story of a disturbed man and securing the narrative agency of the Doctor as storyteller. If we begin the film without a framing structure, there is no narrating agency. While the German print refers to “Der Mann” and “Die Frau” throughout, the English-language print assigns names to its characters. Also, instead of using intertitles, the English-language print superimposes its titles as subtitles over the image. An analysis of the film must take into account the variance in these prints because narrative information is presented in a more redundant manner in the English-language print. For example, while the German print begins directly with the bedroom shaving scene, the English-language print not only establishes the framing “case history,” but follows with explicit subtitles over the shots of Werner Krauss shaving his wife's neck: “Facts of the case: Martin Fellman, a chemist, one morning while trimming the hair on the back of his wife's neck …”

29. In the English-language print, there is no separate intertitle to interrupt the images. Instead, the subtitle, “Help! Murder! Help!” appears over the image of the woman screaming.

30. Again, the narrative information in the English print is not supplied by a separate intertitle, but by a subtitle over the image: “He did it with a razor—.”

31. In the English print, the subtitle “Martin dreamed that …” appears over a shot of the husband in his bed.

32. This is a translation of the intertitle in the German print. In the English print: “The day before my disorder became apparent, a terrible storm raged.”

33. Atwell (42) says the optical effects in the dream sequence took six weeks to produce.

34. Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 31. Eisner seems to attribute these aspects of the dream sequence to Pabst, not to Metzner or Seeber.

35. The superimposition of the three tower bells with the three women's faces suggests a French-English pun on belle and bell, a visual pun that would later be used by Luis Buñuel in Tristana (1970).

36. The English-language print is more explicit about his profession. The subtitle reads: “I am a psychoanalyst; it is part of my work.”

37. This account is given in Chodorkoff and Baxter, 321, quoted from the unpublished biography.

38. The Compound Cinema, 412.