SOURCE: Konigsberg, Ira. “Cinema, Psychoanalysis, and Hermeneutics: G. W. Pabst's Secrets of a Soul.” Michigan Quarterly Review 34, no. 4 (fall 1995): 519-47.

[In the following essay, Konigsberg examines Secrets of the Soul in the context of films that feature psychoanalysts as either saviors or demons.]

In the 1948 film The Snake Pit, a psychiatrist (played by Leo Genn) has a long therapeutic session with a patient (played by Olivia de Havilland) in which he slowly opens up to her two earlier traumas that have resulted in her nervous breakdown and incarceration in a mental institution. A photograph of Sigmund Freud prominently appears on the wall behind them throughout much of the scene. The Snake Pit was Hollywood's fifth highest box-office success for the year and earned an impressive list of Academy Award nominations. Freud and psychoanalysis have on occasion been good box office and have also been treated with a certain amount of reverence in commercial cinema. We should remember that many Hollywood film-makers were under the influence of psychoanalysts at the time, an influence evident in the many films of the 1950s and 1960s that employ psychotherapists, and here I mean both analysts and nonanalysts, as an important and positive element in their plots. One looks back with nostalgia to a time when psychotherapists were not fools like Richard Dreyfuss in What About Bob (1991), lovesick fools like Dudley Moore in Lovesick (1983), corrupt lovesick fools like Richard Gere in Final Analysis (1991), or cannibals like Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Psychotherapists were certainly portrayed as comic or horrific figures in earlier films, but they were also treated with a good deal more respect than in recent years. The number of relatively high-profile films during the past decade with depraved, demented, dysfunctional, or simply incompetent therapists, however, seems to be making a statement—a statement, perhaps, about the way psychotherapy is currently perceived in the public mind. Psychotherapists are receiving their share of abuse in film along with other professional types like lawyers or doctors—there has always been a democratic undercurrent of disdain for authority figures in our popular culture (more so, I might add, than for our wealthy class) and the times are ripe for disdaining authority. But we are talking about the movies, a popular art form that establishes a historical context and a set of conventions in which professional types are caught: for example, Richard Gere's role as the duped psychotherapist is certainly a spinoff from William Hurt's performance as the incompetent lawyer in Body Heat (1981). Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs is the modern equivalent of the deranged scientist or doctor in the earlier horror film—only in this case we have moved from the attempts of the earlier figure to control the human body to an attempt to control the mind, from Dr. Frankenstein putting together the parts of dead bodies to Hannibal disassembling the layers of the human psyche. His cannibalism is a metaphor for his wish to devour the mind of the heroine—he is our culture's ultimate depiction of the “shrink.”

These contemporary portrayals of the “shrink” in cinema may also be a defensive reaction of our culture against the truth that our time is in considerable need of psychotherapy, that the psychotherapist potentially carries significant power. An important essay by Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and his Magic,” demonstrates apparent differences and interesting correspondences between the shamans of primitive cultures and the psychoanalyst in ours, especially in their role of causing a “conversion” in an individual and thus integrating his or her “contradictory elements” into more acceptable “systems of reference” (178). I would like to take this parallel in another direction and add to the shaman and psychoanalyst such figures from a variety of cultures as the psychotherapist in general, the witch doctor, the alchemist, the priest, the artist, and the scientist, and claim that they all perform a similar role in the popular minds of their respective cultures, acting as both an intermediary and a transitional object between this world and another, between everyday reality and some other type of reality, between the known and the unknown. The Exorcist (1973) combines the priest and psychiatrist in the figure of Father Karas. In such films as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), Dressed to Kill (1980), The Howling (1981), Manhunter (1986), and The Silence of the Lambs, the psychiatrist becomes a focal point for the fears and terrors we associate with unknown worlds, but, interestingly, none of these figures are analysts.

The 1926 silent film Secrets of a Soul¹ is the first of a different group of films in which the psychoanalyst specifically becomes our savior from such fears and terrors. I am referring to a group of salvational films in which Freud hovers in the background—in one version of Secrets of a Soul a portrait of Freud appears on the screen after the opening titles that praise his contributions²—in which psychiatry and psychotherapy are considerably influenced by psychoanalysis, in which the unconscious and the methodology of psychoanalysis that discloses that unconscious are treated with reverence and fascination.³ I shall mention as examples four films in this category after the Pabst film: Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound in 1945, a film that in spite of all its outrages finds most of its suspense and twists of plot in the unconscious mind of its hero and that brings the surrealistic images of Salvador Dali to its dream sequence; Mine Own Executioner, a British film about a lay analyst that appeared in 1947 and that has been totally forgotten;⁴The Snake Pit in 1948; John Huston's well-intentioned if misguided Freud in 1962 that focuses on the great man's early life and theories. We might do better to concentrate on these films than the counter-transference films in which we have met the enemy, who also happens to be a psychotherapist, and he is us. Aggression and violence have generally been film's particular forte, satisfying the public's id as a type of socially acceptable pornography; and films about psychotherapy have been quick to tap into film's romance with violence, to exploit and explore the death instinct more than other aspects of the psyche in order to satisfy the audience's vicarious taste for thrills. Though some of the salvational films fall into this vast category, all of them present the analyst not as the perpetrator of violence but as our savior from self-destructive impulses.

The opening titles to Secrets of A Soul immediately identify the film as salvational in nature while also placing it in a historical context.

In everyone's life, there are desires and passions that remain unknown to our conscious minds. In dark hours of emotional conflict, such unconscious drives try to assert themselves. Such struggles engender mysterious illnesses, the explanation and healing of which are the professional province of psychoanalysis. The teachings of university professor Dr. Sigmund Freud signify an important development in the training of doctors schooled in psychoanalysis who treat such emotional illnesses.⁵

Freud's relation to Secrets of a Soul was cautious.⁶ Ernest Jones in his biography of Freud relates that Samuel Goldwyn, “the well-known film director [sic], approached Freud with an offer of $100,000 if he would cooperate in making a film depicting scenes from the famous love stories of history, beginning with Antony and Cleopatra.” Jones tells us that Freud was “amused” at Goldwyn's “ingenious way of exploiting the association between psychoanalysis and love,” but declined the offer. Jones goes on to describe how Hans Neumann approached Karl Abraham about consultation for a film to be made by Germany's famous UFA film company concerning “the mechanisms of psychoanalysis” (114). Abraham wrote Freud about the offer on 7 June 1925, stating that the film company wanted Freud's authorization and that Abraham himself was to make suggestions on behalf of Freud's colleagues. He also mentioned a “comprehensible and non-scientific pamphlet on psychoanalysis” that he was to write and that would be published in conjunction with the film. Abraham argued for the project on the basis that it would be better to have such a film supervised by those in the know than any of “the wild analysts in Berlin” and also mentioned the possibility of publishing the pamphlet through their psychoanalytic press, the Verlag, and thus helping its fortunes (382-83). Freud's reactions were not at all positive, and his comments on film and psychoanalysis have been quoted many times over: “My chief objection is still that I do not believe that satisfactory plastic representation of our abstractions is at all possible.” His following remark is also worth quoting: “We do not want to give our consent to anything insipid. Mr. Goldwyn was at any rate clever enough to stick to the aspect of our subject that can be plastically represented very well, that is to say, love.” Freud went on to say that since Abraham seemed “not disinclined to engage in the matter,” they should both wait and see if the script was good, and, if so, he would later give his authorization, though he preferred not to have his name associated with the project at all (384).

Hanns Sachs worked with Abraham as a consultant on the film and ultimately became the chief advisor when Abraham withdrew because of ill health. Both Abraham and Sachs are designated as “fellow workers” on the cover of the screenplay, with Colin Ross and Hans Neumann listed as writers.⁷ The title page reads, The Secrets of the Soul, A Psychoanalytical Film Project, followed by Part Two: The Secret of a Soul, A Psychoanalytical Chamberplay. It seems unlikely that part one refers to the pamphlet that was to be written, since that publication was to be an exegesis of the film itself. One can only wonder at this time about the overall scope of the project originally intended. At some point in late summer or early fall of 1925, G. W. Pabst became the director of the film—Pabst had recently directed Joyless Street, certainly the most famous of the German street films and a work that shows Pabst extending his expressionistic film technique into the realm of realistic social problems. Secrets of a Soul was his fourth film and demonstrates a logical solution to the tension in his earlier work between expressionism and naturalism by using the former technique for the dream and memory sequences and the latter for the events taking place in the conscious, everyday world. The husband in the film is played by Werner Krauss, who played the role of the psychiatrist Dr. Caligari in the first German expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—recall that in the interior story he is a mad doctor who controls the mind and actions of the somnambulist Cesare and in the frame story he appears to be the kind and healing figure who is about to bring Francis back to sanity, both roles indicative of the ambiguous psychiatrist in future film. There is some irony and perhaps some significance in the fact that the first major psychiatrist and first actual analysand in cinema were played by the same actor. The role of the analyst in Secrets of a Soul, Dr. Charles Orth, was played by Pavel Pavlov, an actor from the Moscow Art Theater who spoke only Russian and at first knew nothing about psychoanalysis.

Jones tells us that Freud later complained to Abraham that “the film company were announcing without his consent, that the film was being made and presented ‘with Freud's cooperation’” (114). Indeed, Time magazine in this country even stated that “every foot of the film … will be planned and scrutinized by Dr. Freud.” Abraham became upset at attempts by A. S. Storfer, director of the Verlag, and Siegfried Bernfeld to sell a script for another psychoanalytic film. But Sachs clearly became central in the making of Secrets of a Soul and wrote the short monograph on the film called Psychoanalysis: Riddle of the Unconscious,⁸ which was intended as an explanation of some basic psychoanalytic concepts and as an explication of the film. The film was screened at a psychoanalytic congress held in Berlin to celebrate Freud's seventieth birthday in 1926 and was well received after its opening in Europe and the United States.

Freud's prejudice against cinema is curious, especially since his theories and the film medium were born at virtually the same time and both offered entries into the human mind. At the end of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud compares the psyche “to a compound microscope or photographic apparatus, or something of the kind [in which] … psychical locality will correspond to a point inside that apparatus at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being” (V. 5, 536); yet in his “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad” (1925),⁹ some twenty-five years later and published only a year before the appearance of Secrets of a Soul, when he again seems to be in earnest search for some kind of apparatus that will act as a metaphor for the operations of the mind, he rejects devices such as the “photographic camera” because they cannot receive new impressions while holding onto memory traces of earlier perceptions. The writing pad with its thin plastic layer on top of a wax base seems a much better representative of the mental process he wishes to suggest. It is interesting to speculate why Freud was so resistant to the film medium and its potential for dealing with the human mind, especially since this is the direction that some of the earliest theorizing on film was to take. Perhaps his distrust was due to the newness of the medium in general and its appeal to a wide public—there has always been a certain vulgarity associated with film because of its popularity, its tendency to simplify human nature, and its exploitative appeal to the audience's less civilized emotions. But, ironically, was not this dark, emotional world the very landscape of the human psyche that Freud himself explored, and was not this the reason for Goldwyn's offer to him? Freud might also have been resistant to film because he was still unaware of its imagistic potential, its capacity to use superimpositions, split screens, dissolves, models, matting shots and other special effects to create a mental time and space, as it was to do in Secrets of a Soul.

Ten years before the appearance of Secrets of a Soul, Hugo Münsterberg, a German psychologist teaching at Harvard, published The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, a significant attempt to show the correspondence of film to the human mind, at least in its conscious aspects:¹⁰ “We recognize that in every case the objective world of outer events had been shaped and molded until it became adjusted to the subjective movements of the mind. The mind develops memory ideas and imaginative ideas; in the moving picture they become reality” (58). As early as 1916, someone is noticing how the motion picture, with its use of close-ups, flashbacks and flashforwards, and movement in space “obeys the laws of the mind rather than those of the outer world” (41). At the same time as the production of Secrets of a Soul in Germany, a group of avant-garde filmmakers in France was beginning to use film as an expression of the unconscious. Although we can find various theoreticians in later years discussing film as a psychological art form, the most significant advance in this direction took place in the 1960s, especially with the writing of Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz in France. Baudry and Metz were influential in laying upon film theory the burden of Jacques Lacan and his concept of the mirror phase, but they are especially interesting in their use of Freud to explicate the viewer's response to the film medium. The relation between film and dream has often been suggested in film theory, but Baudry and Metz are the first writers to make the correspondence seem convincing. I have no time to go into the analogy but let me say that sitting in a darkened area, passive in an immobile state, with images appearing before their consciousness, viewers loosen their hold on reality and undergo a type of regressive experience that puts them in a state akin to that of dreaming and day-dreaming. The fact that the images themselves are signifiers without any reality, are a two-dimensional imprint of a world that does not exist in reality, reminds us of the images of our dreams that also have no actuality. The crucial mechanism here is the way, in a state of reverie, we project our fantasies into the images on the screen, the way in which our fantasies interact with those on the screen so that what we see seems to emanate from ourselves, just the way the dream images are a creation of our own psyches.

If viewing a film is akin to the dream experience, if the special power of film is to give presence to a fantasy world, a film such as Secrets of A Soul, which offers a dream as a central portion of its narrative, is creating for us the experience of viewing a dream within a dream. Just as the play within the play discloses some hidden truth about what takes place in the outer world of the literary text, so does the dream within the film, itself experienced as a dream, disclose a similar hidden truth about the world that surrounds it. Freud comments that “What is dreamt in a dream after waking from the ‘dream within the dream’ is what the dream-wish seeks to put in the place of an obliterated reality. It is safe to suppose, therefore, that what has been ‘dreamt’ in the dream is a representation of the reality, the true recollection, while the continuation of the dream, on the contrary, merely represents what the dreamer wishes” (338). Freud's point is that the inner dream discloses some reality, some truth that the outer dream hides. Secrets of a Soul, therefore, indicates that films about psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis itself in its reading and use of dreams, function according to already-established practices and rules of narrative art and are influenced by the same basic strategies of interpretation.

Psychoanalysis in general functions according to methodologies similar to those we use when analyzing both a literary and film text, when we first understand the manifest content while searching for a latent meaning, but when we also put all of our information, manifest and latent, into some type of structure or developmental order.¹¹ The Russian formalists have given us a set of terms that help us better understand the second part of this interpretive strategy, the “sujet” and the “fabula”—the first term referring to the text in the order that we find it, and the second referring to the text that we both discover and rearrange in our own mind so that we finally have a logically ordered sequence of events that tell the larger story.¹² Interpreting texts according to their “sujet” and “fabula” is close to the analytical method where the material as it is given and then deciphered is put into some type of logical ordering, some kind of cause and effect relationship, some kind of sequence and development that also tells the larger story. I am discussing what in psychoanalytic terms is referred to as “construction” or, more accurately, “reconstruction,” concepts that I shall turn to in more detail later in this essay, after we look at Pabst's film and are ready to make some larger cultural generalizations. The most obvious type of narrative text that fits the “sujet/fabula” and “reconstruction” paradigms is the mystery, where the reader or viewer is impelled to discover some hidden events that will explain the present situation, some hidden cause and effect relationship between events, some logical and chronological order that transcends the material as presented. This may explain why psychotherapy is often presented in film in the context of a mystery. In such works there seem to be two mysteries—the mystery involving the external events and the mystery of one of the character's psyches, often some trauma or traumatic event that explains the outer mystery or contributes to its explanation.¹³ Indeed, what also takes place in a number of these films is the conflation of both aggressor and victim so that the mysteries we seek to answer are explained by such characters' self-victimizations—so that these characters are, indeed, their own executioners.¹⁴

Let me specify how most of the psychoanalytic salvational films fit into this general category. In the psychoanalytic films, where the focus is usually on a character's self-victimization, we seem to resolve a mystery about the character that only covers up another mystery; we seem to discover something that answers to the course of present events only to discover that there is another mystery to be answered, another level of psychic events that is a truer explanation of what has taken place—it is as if these films are never satisfied with what they at first explain, as if they are suggesting that the mystery of the mind goes deeper and deeper. In Mine Own Executioner, a man nearly strangles his wife and, with the help of his analyst, is able to remember a traumatic experience in which he killed a guard while escaping from a camp for prisoners of war. But while the patient feels grateful that he now understands the buried past that has led to his irrational behavior, the analyst feels that the patient is still dangerous because some earlier traumatic experience remains buried and unrecognized. This other trauma is only hinted at and never fully exposed before the tragic ending of the film. In The Snake Pit, the therapist, through the use of truth serum, encourages the patient to remember the car accident that caused the death of her male friend, but immediately we discover some interior, earlier experience, an event when as a young girl she wished for the death of her father just before he actually died.¹⁵ This backward direction of the sujet in order to propose the forward direction of a larger fabula is most obvious in Freud, a work that dramatizes Sigmund Freud's self-analysis and his parallel analysis of the composite character Cecily, showing him pushing further and further into the psyche, back in time, until his discovery of childhood sexuality which is the first step in the development of the oedipal complex that explains his, Cecily's, and our present mental states.

In a curious way, Secrets of A Soul satisfies the type of structure I am describing—the mystery behind the mystery, the explanation behind the explanation, the psychic trauma behind the psychic trauma. On the surface, the film's story is quite simple. A husband and wife live together congenially, but are unable to have children. A murder next door and the announced visit of the wife's cousin, a childhood friend of the couple, precipitate in the husband an emotional reaction and strange dream, at the end of which he repeatedly stabs his wife. The actual visit of the cousin and a childhood photograph exacerbate his condition to the point where he is unable to hold a knife because of his fear of stabbing his wife. He undergoes psychoanalysis, while living apart from his wife with his mother, and is finally cured when he and the analyst, with the help of the dream and photograph, trace his present emotional state back to an event in his childhood that caused him to become jealous of his wife's relationship with her cousin. The cousin goes off and the couple go on to parenthood and a happy life. But the explanation that the film puts forth for the husband's knife phobia, for his present irrational actions, cannot possibly be the full reason—the events from the past recounted in the film suggest earlier events that are a truer explanation for the patient's present behavior, though these earlier events are not articulated in the film itself.

The structure of the film indicates the kind of inward movement that I am referring to as a series of frames—of frames within frames. The titles that begin the film, the statement concerning Dr. Sigmund Freud and his teaching as well as Freud's photograph (everything that appears on the screen is part of the film's sujet and also part of its fiction) create for us a level of “reality” in which the film's narrative action is to be embedded. The portrait of Freud appears in the Rohauer print of the film, where it is immediately followed by a brief scene showing Dr. Orth writing, “Facts of the case of Martin Fellman, a chemist …,” a scene paralleled in the final shots of this version when we see him writing,

Case History #326
Martin Fellman
Illness: Knife Phobia(16)

The framing device of Dr. Orth writing his case history not only encloses the narrative actions in another frame, but also attempts to place them in a larger context of which they are only a part—case #326 means that there have been 325 other cases for this particular psychoanalyst. In this version of the film, then, the narration of the husband, his wife, and her cousin actually begins within two frames, the first, that of Freud and psychoanalysis; the second, that of Dr. Orth and his case histories. But the narrative itself is obviously the frame for the larger and more significant action and imagery of the husband's dream, which itself becomes a frame for the story of the childhood event that led to the dream—and, I wish to argue, this childhood event is only a frame for a deeper configuration and dynamics that we must figure out for ourselves.

The pamphlet that Hanns Sachs wrote as a guide to the film is of help to us now. In this pamphlet Sachs attempts to write a primer concerning psychoanalysis and an explication of the film in psychoanalytic terms. An opening explanation of parapraxis¹⁷ (a misaction like a slip of the tongue or misplacing an object that results from unconscious motives) leads to a discussion of the hero's breaking of the test tube in the film and then an extensive explication of the film, with citations of other examples of parapraxis. Sachs also provides explanations of phobia and compulsion to explain the behavior of the film's protagonist. The central portion of the explication is an analysis of the husband's dream. For the most part Sachs' explication of the film is no more satisfying than the analyst's explication within the film, but Sachs lets us in on the secret of Secrets of a Soul toward the end of his pamphlet when he tells us that “Erotic problems, which have been especially important for psychoanalysis, are touched upon at various points but could be clarified only to a certain degree” (29).

A good deal in the film is not clarified. I suppose we can say that even though the film is dealing with a talking cure, the images must speak for themselves, tell us more than the film's titles—logically this must be the case since this is a motion picture and a silent one at that, but more is suggested and hidden in the narrative than in even the most ambiguous and subtle of silent narrative films. The explanation that the husband's desire to kill his wife and the resulting knife phobia are the products of a jealousy that can be traced back to the childhood event in which his wife gave a doll to her cousin might cure the husband in the film, but it hardly satisfies the viewer. I will suggest briefly what I believe the film wants us to interpret for ourselves. When the husband shaves the back of his wife's neck, at the start of the narrative, and then cuts her as the result of a shout of “Murder” from a neighboring house, his act is clearly connected to the actual murder announced by the shout, which, we later learn, was committed with a razor and “prompted by jealousy.” His accidental injury of his wife is thus made to suggest his own jealousy and the possibility of his committing some greater violence on her; but it also suggests an act of violence that we cannot yet perceive, one that seems to disturb and threaten the characters in the film. The razor and the gash on the wife's neck suggest from the start that on some still unrecognizable level we are dealing with violent sexuality.

We soon find out that the couple is childless, that their childlessness is the product of their dysfunctional sexual life which we are led to attribute to the husband. There is a telling moment when a little girl, to whom the husband has just given a piece of candy in his laboratory, is told by her mother, “Come, Daddy is waiting for us,” as if to indicate to us that the husband is not the little girl's Daddy or a Daddy in general, that Daddy is elsewhere, and that, by not being a Daddy, the husband is still a child. We should note at this point that Daddy is also missing from the interior story of the film, that though the husband's mother is alive, apparently his father is not, and that in his memories of the past, only his mother appears.

The absence of the husband's father allows for the ready identification of the wife's cousin with this figure. The cousin had sent them a statue of Kwanon, the Japanese mother-goddess, with a child in her lap, and a Japanese dagger. The dagger is both phallic and destructive, yet it is important that the statue with which it is associated is a statue of maternity and not fertility. The statue stands for the wife who is potentially a mother and the dagger for the husband's phallic desires but also for the fact that his impotence has murdered life. But we must, of course, relate the dagger to the razor with which he lacerated his wife's neck and see it as a symbol for the rage and destructive impulses that he seems to hold for the woman (and, perhaps, for women in general). The husband slowly pulls the dagger out of its scabbard and then throws it down with repulsion. His later inability to hold either razor or knife, after his dream and the scene the following night when he feels a compulsion to plunge the dagger into his wife's neck, indicates that the razor and knife have become instruments of potential destruction for him personally, in part as instruments of aggression to overcome his own phallic weakness, but also, we begin to surmise, because of his jealousy of his wife and her cousin. But the film is starting to force us to surmise something else, that, on some level, the husband associates his wife and her cousin with his mother and father, and that the razor and dagger represent his own feared punishment of castration by his father for his oedipal wishes for his mother.

Earlier in the film, when the analyst asks the husband why he and his wife cannot have babies, the husband describes to him “wild fantasies” in which he sees himself looking unhappily through some kind of trellis while his erotically clad wife makes love with her cousin. What is constantly hinted at, then, through the film's very apparent suggestion of violence in the interactions of the men and women, in the phallic symbols of the razor and knife, in the female symbol of the slash, in the closed bedrooms and separating doors, is the primal scene and the child's association of violence both with the sexual act performed between the parents, but also the punishment with which he is threatened by the father for sexually desiring his mother. No wonder the husband is unable to consummate his relationship with his wife. In his adult life, he has taken the place of the father by becoming a husband; but in his inhibition to take the place of his father he has taken upon himself a symbolic castration in his inability to have sex with his wife. Thus as castrated husband he also assumes the role of the punished son.

All of this is carefully suggested by the events in the dream, replete with sexual imagery. The large tower, shaped like a penis, for example, that suddenly arises in the middle of the Italian village indicates the sexual nature of the husband's own inadequacy but also the threatening penis of both the cousin and the father whom he represents. The husband's sexual inadequacy and his fear of castration are indicated both by the anxious way in which he rushes up the tower (three times we see the same middle-long shot of him running up the steps on the side of the tall structure), frantically leans out and gestures, and then drops his hat; and by the faces of three women—his servant, wife, and assistant—superimposed over the tolling bells, laughing at him derisively for his impotence.

The husband's guilt, not only for cutting his wife's neck and for his murderous impulses toward her, but also guilt from early childhood for his feelings toward his mother, lead to a court trial with his father-surrogate, the cousin as prosecutor. The wife bares her neck and points to the slash from her husband's razor. The storm outside melts into the world of his dreams and produces the drum rolls that announce his guilt and his execution but also announce the key sequence of the film.

The husband's laboratory has become his cell; he rushes to the window, lifts himself to the bars, and down below sees a boat with his wife and her cousin. Close-up shots of the husband frantically screaming are interspersed throughout the scene viewed in a high-angle, point-of-view shot from the husband's perspective. His wife catches a doll that is meant to represent a baby and that seems to leap into her arms from the water. She cuddles the baby and then gives it to her cousin, waving to her husband as the boat moves off. The dream ends violently, with the husband, over and over, thrusting the dagger into an image of his wife, thrusting it as if performing a savage act of intercourse. Later, during his therapy, when the analyst tells him that the baby coming from the water signifies “impending” or “desired” birth, the husband has the clue that weakens his defenses and allows him to find the episode in his past that can explain his present phobia and compulsion. The solution he works out falls short of the solution that we are supposed to read into the film, partly because the husband has not realized whose birth he has been witnessing in his dream—that his wife and her cousin as stand-ins for his parents have actually given birth to him,¹⁸ that he has witnessed the primal scene responsible for his own existence, that his screaming throughout the scene has been his screaming as a baby first entering the world, that the savage thrusts of his dagger into his wife were his angry reaction to his parents' copulation and an act of desire for his own mother.

Another psychodynamic element that ought to be noted is the strong attraction that the husband feels for his wife's cousin.¹⁹ I have suggested that in his unconscious, the husband sees in this man the usurping and threatening figure of the father who has taken his mother from him and who threatens him with castration. But though the husband may feel anger toward this man, he is strongly drawn to him. Their embraces are worth noting, but so is that moment when the two meet after so many years and the cousin pats the husband on the stomach, an action that suggests a fond husband patting the swollen belly of his pregnant wife. The screenplay for the film strongly implies that such feelings exist especially for the husband when it describes his nervous tension while he continuously and demonstratively strokes the cousin's face during their greetings. The film, then, very much suggests that part of the husband's problem may also be the strong attraction he feels for his wife's cousin, an attraction that may draw its source from his unconscious identification of this figure with his father—or perhaps I should say unconscious substitution of this figure for his father since the latter never appears in the film nor in the husband's memories. It is conceivable that the husband is also angry with his wife for taking her cousin's affections from him. The child never shakes loose of the attraction it feels for the father, a buried attraction that in the male child leaves a residue of homosexual feelings that can in later years fix on a male replacement for the father.

I shall explain this relationship further in a moment, but first I must turn to the final scene to complete our survey of the work and introduce one more interpretive level. The final scene in Secrets of A Soul always reminds me of the penultimate scene of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957). The scene in the later film is dreamed by Isak Borg, but the conclusion of Secrets is also dreamlike and unreal. In Bergman's film Isak redreams and revises the primal scene, nay sets it right by fantasizing the pastoral scene in which his parents sit by the lake, his father fishing with a long pole, and wave to him to join them. The film ends with the seventy-six year-old man smiling as he falls into a deep sleep, smiling because he has substituted for his original fantasy of the primal scene this ideal vision which now includes him. The final scene in Secrets celebrates the husband's successful psychotherapy by demonstrating that he has overcome his impotence and become a father. He fishes with a long pole in a rich pastoral setting and then rushes to his wife who holds their baby. But the husband's passionate rush to his wife, the fact that he throws his basket of fish into the water, the wavering handheld shot of him as he rushes up the hill suggest another level, another story for us to discover—the husband still acts like a child at the conclusion of the film, acts like he is rushing to his mother.

Although Abraham had written on the oral stage and made an important contribution with his work on oral sadism, I think that the advisors to the film intended us to interpret it largely on an oedipal level; but in dealing so fully with this level of the psyche, they inevitably, though unwittingly, opened up the husband's soul to other levels of interpretation. Immediately before viewing the photographs of himself, his wife, and her cousin, the husband views one of himself and his mother, suggesting, I believe, another subtext in the film and another level to his psychic conflicts. The husband feels both a bonding with and rage for his mother that seem to derive from an earlier time of his childhood than that which we have been discussing. Hanns Sachs, in his pamphlet, describes a scene that appears in the screenplay but in none of the versions of the film now available. Overwhelmed by his compulsion and the feeling that he will never be able to control it, the husband rushes to his laboratory to take poison. About to end his life, his eyes focus on a picture of his mother, and he realizes “that yet another woman plays a role in his life, one with a love that reaches farther back and is deeper than the one which joins him to his wife” (10). Bringing the picture of his mother to his lips for a parting kiss, he knocks over the bottle of poison and is saved. Sachs means the incident to indicate the saving power of his love for his mother, but this love may also be regressive and paralyzing. In the Rohauer print of the film we read the title, “In mental distress, Martin's mind turned to his mother.” Unable to live at home with his wife because of his compulsion to mutilate her with a sharp instrument, the husband goes to live with his mother while he is in therapy. There is an especially impressive scene in which his mother cuts his food before hiding the knife upon his arrival. The husband then sits at the table, eating his meat with a spoon with obvious childish pleasure. A considerable reversal and regression has taken place in his life—in this instance it is his mother who wields the phallic knife and it is the husband who regresses to helpless childhood. The husband's relationship with his mother might also further explain his homosexual feelings for the cousin in a psychoanalytic context. Freud discusses the process whereby young boys with such maternal attachments, after puberty, internalize the mother and identify with her to the point of taking on her love objects. Although he at first suggests that such a process satisfies the boy's narcissism since the love-object becomes a substitute for his childish self, he later argues that the object can also be identified with the mother's other love, the father.²⁰ I would argue that at the same time that the child feels this excessive love for the mother, he also feels a rage at this dependency and attachment.

Indeed, the husband seems to feel rage at all the women in the film, as we can see in the dream—the derisive laughter of the three women with their heads superimposed upon the tolling bells is an indication of the shame and inadequacy he feels from his relationship with women in general. His behavior in his dream when he slashes wildly with the knife at the image of his wife, a slashing repeated at the end of his therapy as a type of abreaction that is supposed to indicate his cure,²¹ reminds me of Melanie Klein's terrible infant, venting its rage on the body of its mother in its fantasies (128-30). Part of the husband's rage may derive from the fact that he will never be able to father a baby with his mother; but the rage seems to date from a more primitive time, when he saw the woman as giving but also depriving—as a totally controlling figure. The husband's regression to childhood when he dines with his mother suggests that he has not yet been able to separate from her in a healthy way—she remains an internalized object that controls his dreams, his memories, and his marriage. The statue of Kwanon that the cousin has sent to the husband and his wife is more than a symbol of maternity; she also represents the powerful mother who still holds control over the husband's emotional life. The dagger that the cousin has sent them, then, and all the razors and knives in the film, take on another level of meaning. The husband stabbing wildly with a knife at the image of his wife, who, in his unconscious has come to represent his mother, is the husband attempting symbolically to cut the umbilical cord that still has him connected to this powerful figure. The husband's dream, his phobia and compulsion in the film, are all symptoms of his struggle for separation and individuation.

Secrets of a Soul, then, is a far more subtle and complex work than film history has allowed.²² The dream-sequence, an innovative and bold attempt to use the spatial and temporal flexibilities of the film medium to portray the labyrinthine and many-leveled workings of the mind, is worth the price of admission and certainly seems no less effective than dream sequences in later psychoanalytic films that were to have far more technical advantages from special-effects cinematography. But what is most compelling for the modern viewer is the film's openness to multiple interpretations, none of them contradictory. To read the film is an experience akin to reading the psyche of an individual—levels of meaning overlay one another and fuse together at the same time.²³ Although we discern some kind of developmental order when viewing the film, some type of fabula, this type of ordering imposed upon the film is largely theoretical and tentative, and exists beyond the text and the immediate presence of the main character who remains a complex amalgam. The multivalenced quality to the film that I am describing achieves a significant connection with hermeneutics and interpretation in general as they have developed in the twentieth century. It is not Secrets of a Soul that has changed but the ways in which we read it. Even though the makers of the film had already undermined any clear and unequivocal meaning by compromising on what would be manifest through explicit explanation in the film and what would remain latent in the film's visual imagery, they still were certain about the work's ultimate meaning.

We might, at this point in our discussion, be more sympathetic to Freud's ultimate rejection of the motion-picture camera in his search for some kind of mechanical metaphor for the operations of the mind. Certainly film can project images on a screen in such a fashion that they resemble thought, fantasy, and dream; but Freud wished to find a sufficiently complex metaphor to describe the way the brain operates. We must admit that he was right about the limitation of film emulsion as a metaphor for the storing power of the brain, about its inability to repress and store an endless series of images of reality. The filmic process is a good metaphor for the way in which the brain registers and then recalls to consciousness at a later time some series of events—but the emulsion is limited, normally, to only one such registration. The mystic writing pad at least has the virtue of countless registrations, even though the images cannot again be reconfigured. It has the virtue of suggesting the layers of “memory-traces” that can be received, absorbed, and fused together by the mind. Freud's writing pad is an apt metaphor for the multivalenced and complex network of representations and significations of the “mnemic systems” stored in the mind (1925, 230).

An ambivalence about the validity and authenticity of any single psychoanalytic interpretation in analysis in general may be suggested by the way in which Freud seems to minimize the difference between the the terms “construction” and “reconstruction” (between putting together something for the first time and putting together something that has already existed in the past) in his essay “Construction in Analysis.” He claims that “interpretation” is something “one does to a single element of the material while “construction” is “when one lays before the subject of the analysis a piece of his early history that he has forgotten.” But he also writes, “We do not pretend that an individual construction is anything more than a conjecture which awaits examination, confirmation or rejection” (259-65). Construction, then, is dependent upon both individual interpretations of isolated elements in the analysis but also upon a broader conjecture or interpretation of the material that awaits confirmation on the part of the analysand. Freud seems fairly certain, however, that the past, for the analyst, is recoupable: “His work of construction or, if it is preferred, of reconstruction, resembles to a great extent the archaeologist's excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried of some ancient edifice.” Both the analyst and archeologist must “reconstruct by means of supplementing and combining the surviving remains” and both are “subject to many of the same difficulties and sources of error”; but the analyst works under better conditions since he is dealing with material, none of which is permanently destroyed and all of which is finally accessible. In spite of the partial story that Secrets of a Soul explicitly unfolds, its screenplay, like the film itself, demonstrates the same confidence we find in Freud's essay for reassembling the past when it tells us that at one point, during the analytic sessions, the Doctor's eyes light up—“the reconstruction has worked for him” (107). From then on the analytic sessions in the screenplay are divided between the husband's memories of events and sections marked “Picture of the Doctor's Reconstruction.”

Such confidence in interpretation and the recuperation of the past has been undermined in recent years in the psychoanalytic literature. Donald P. Spence, for example, has argued that the creation of the patient's life into a logical narrative is “evidence more of a general preference for closure and good fit than for the effectiveness of the technique or the usefulness of the theory” (123).²⁴ Harold P. Blum's balanced work on the subject, Reconstruction in Psychoanalysis: Childhood Revisited and Recreated, states that reconstruction is a dynamic, contextual, and developing process that “is never ‘what really happened,’ as might be proposed by external observers or historians” (37).

This shift in analytical thinking resembles a similar change that has taken place in literary interpretation, a movement from the interpretive strategy that E. D. Hirsch, Jr. argues for in Validity in Interpretation, first published in 1967, when he says that “even though we can never be certain that our interpretive guesses are correct, we know that they can be correct and that the goal of interpretation as a discipline is constantly to increase the probability that they are correct” (207), to the type of thinking by such deconstructionists as Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller in the 1970s and 1980s and represented by Jonathan Culler's statement in On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism: “In reading particular works and rereadings of these works, deconstruction attempts to understand these phenomena of textuality—the relations of language and metalanguage, for example, or effects of externality and internality, or the possible interaction of conflicting logics” (225). The group of salvational films I am discussing are structured to produce the type of reading suggested by Culler. They are mystery films par excellence and their multiple mysteries concern the human psyche and our ability and inability to understand that psyche. These films are ultimately about processes, the process of the psychotherapist and his patient to solve the mysteries of the soul but also the process of the viewer to understand the mysteries—the various textualities and logics—of the film. If one thinks of these films as finished artifacts, as finitely definable and describable, then they must fail—Secrets of A Soul in this context would be a most unsatisfactory film.

The non-existence of any single work of art called Secrets of a Soul, the fact that there are differing versions at this time and no authorative, original version, emphasizes the impossibility of placing any closure on our attempt to get at the work's meaning. Nor do I think that we shall ever “reconstruct” such an original and definitive print. When I began researching this film, I was advised by a distinguished scholar of German film that I could not possibly write on Secrets of a Soul without using the restored print available at the Film Museum in Munich. When I finally was able to view this print, I was struck by a number of important shots and titles missing from it and available in the Rohauer print—and also impressed by a number of shots in the Munich print not present in either the Rohauer or West-Glen versions. My letter to the present director of the Film Museum in Munich, questioning why shots clearly filmed during production were not used in the original release, resulted in a reply admitting that the “restored” print must not be fully restored and asking for information on the location of the missing material. We may ultimately have a print that puts together all of the available shots, but I doubt we shall ever know the version exactly the way Pabst released it—especially since there are also some major discrepancies between the subtitles and intertitles of the available prints. Any hermeneutics concerning Secrets of a Soul must satisfy the poststructuralist and deconstructive scriptures about interpretation and meaning in general—lacking both the author's presence and any single originary visual or verbal text, the film offers instead a play of texts and meanings.

Secrets of a Soul also raises questions about the privileged status given to language in the theory of interpretation. It does so by asking us to consider whether the film's titles tell us the whole story—or even a piece of one. And it also asks us why its language, the titles we see on the screen, is to be given privileged status, is to be seen as an outside intervention and transcendent truth, and is not to be seen instead as part of the film, as another of the images that we see on the screen, as another element in the secrets and mysteries of the soul, as another text. The uncertain state of the verbal text to the film reinforces this point about the circumscribed nature of language. In the West-Glen version available in this country and in the “restored” version in Munich, which seems to be a fuller version of the former, the all-powerful analyst has disappeared from the opening and closing—we no longer see him framing the film with his act of writing. We must relate to this omission the fact that the West-Glen print has fewer titles than both the “restored” version and the one available in this country from the Rohauer Collection, and that both the West-Glen and Munich prints are missing a long series of titles that convey Dr. Orth's explanation to the husband of the nature of his illness at the end of the therapy.²⁵Secrets of a Soul seems to demonstrate a struggle with language through the differences between its available versions—a struggle exacerbated, nay motivated by the simple fact that the film is silent, silent of spoken language. If psychoanalysis is dependent on language, if language is the passage to the unconscious, what we have in this film is a futile struggle to get to that unconscious. But I must also connect the missing shots of the analyst writing in both the West-Glen and “restored” versions to the missing father in the film as well as to the missing language. I borrow, at this point, a bit of Lacan that reinforces my matriarchal interpretation of this film. What we find in the form and substance of Secrets of a Soul is the struggle to move from the imaginary to the symbolic, the imaginary that fosters a feeling of oneness to the mother, the symbolic that is the realm of the prohibiting language that belongs to the father. If film is truly an oral experience, a taking in of the images and sounds emanating from the screen, and if the screen is itself a residual memory of the dream screen, then it follows that the very nature of film is matriarchal, and the struggle of film to move into the realm of language must be doomed.

The missing language and missing father inevitably lead us back to the role of Dr. Orth in the film. Significantly missing from his interaction with the husband are the issues of transference and, concomitantly, counter-transference—issues not absent from such later salvational films as Mine Own Executioner and Freud. The missing transference and counter-transference become especially obvious in the film's problematic handling of the husband's neurosis and cure, forcing us to impose them on the film ourselves. While we are making, for ourselves, a host of interpretations from the husband's life and dream, the analyst is creating a very limited and circumscribed story, one that emphasizes his own control over the material and over the husband. The powerful analyst has himself become an author in the act of reading, and the patient for him is a “readerly text” on which to inscribe his own meaning, a process we see in the behavior of a large number of the therapists we meet in non-comic films about psychotherapy—a process that savagely erupts in the portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.

At one point in Secrets of a Soul, the husband looks at some photos that his wife has been showing to her cousin. The husband looks fondly at the picture of himself as a young boy and his mother, then one of himself, his wife, and her cousin as children, but appears disturbed when he next views a photograph of the three of them from the same period evidently taken at a Christmas celebration.²⁶ During his psychotherapy the husband remembers the time during the Christmas party when the disturbing photograph was taken—there are two interesting aspects to his memory. The first is the doll held by the little girl since in the actual photograph we have viewed earlier in the film she is empty-handed.²⁷ We must ponder, then, whether events took place exactly as the husband remembers them—or what we are seeing, and what he and the analyst are taking for reality, have instead been changed by projections from the husband's unconscious, altered by his own fantasies. The second interesting element in this memory is the photographer taking the picture, who seems to be aiming his camera right at us, the audience, with a mirror behind him showing his own reflection.²⁸ The presence of the photographer almost seems to authenticate the scene of the three children the way we now see it, but this photographer appears in the husband's memory and is, therefore, only as reliable a recorder of reality as that memory itself—the photographer's reflection in the mirror specifically suggests the separation of memory from reality, the fact that memory shows us a version and reflection of actual events. The shot of the photographer, however, is also a self-reflexive image that makes us ponder more than the mind as a recorder of reality—makes us ponder the issue of art and representation, especially cinema as photography, as moving pictures with the ability and inability to represent reality, both external and internal.

But the photographer is also aiming his camera at us, involving us in his picture-making process and in the world of the film as well, involving us in the impossible search for some original source and original meaning to all these images. Both the uncertainty about the visual representations and the failure of language in the film put the burden of meaning on our interpretive faculties. Secrets of a Soul is ultimately a self-reflexive film about hermeneutics, about interpretation in general, about the process of looking for meaning. The film becomes a “readerly text” for us, an analysand, and we become the empowered analyst. We are invited to play this role, to get into this process, so long as we remember the openness of the film to multiple readings but also to our own counter-transference, the infusion of our own fantasies and defenses. Or perhaps I might say that the film on the screen becomes a unique transitional object for each of us. In analyzing the film I watch it over and over—in fact, it is the nature of film to be seen over and over, pretending to be fixed with the same images, the same titles, the same sequence. But the very act of viewing, the fact that I watch the film each time in a different frame of mind and with a different day's residue, the fact that each print will be seen in a different theater, with a different quality of image and sound, by a different audience, and by different individuals in the audience means that it can never be fixed or determinate in meaning.

And here is the final lesson we learn from viewing Secrets of a Soul: searching the film for any single neurotic pattern or pathology that explains the husband's behavior, like searching for any original or authoritative print of the film, can only be a partial success at best—meaning does not ultimately reside in the work itself but in the person making the interpretation. The three versions of the film (four if we include the one referred to in Sachs' publication) and the multiple interpretations inherent in the text open up the work to contemporary deconstructive readings, reader-response theory, and psychoanalytic concepts of counter-transference and reconstruction. Perhaps now we can understand the natural and increasing appeal of film for psychoanalysts:²⁹ its presentation of images that create an experience not far from dreaming or daydreaming, that provoke us to interpret them not only in terms of what the film presents to us as its meaning but also in terms of something hidden and subversive; our attempt to put image into language and to fix the meaning of image through language; the fact that we are always interpreting in spite of the fact that we are always misremembering; and the fact that our discovery of the latent in the manifest and our construction of the fabula from the sujet are together a creative act that is part of the entire work's development. Films may pretend to have their own meanings, but there can be no meanings without someone doing the interpreting and, I must add, taking part in the fantasy—the viewing experience is the experience of analysis, but the true film critic realizes that he or she is both analyst and analysand. The frequent appearance of psychotherapists in film, the frequent stories that involve psychotherapy, are a tautology because film viewing, to begin with, is an analytic process—but because all tautologies are self-reflexive, such films draw attention to what the film medium is all about.

Notes

1. The German title is Geheimnisse einer Seele. Translated as “Soul” in the English title, “Seele” maintains its original meaning rather than being deprived of its spiritual significance as when Strachey translates Freud's use of the word as “psyche” or “mind” in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. See Bettelheim for a discussion of the English translations of Freud's works.

2. The portrait appears in an English-language version of the film available in this country as part of the Rohauer Collection. The Filmmuseum of the Münchner Stadtmuseum claims that its version of the film is “restored,” even though the print is missing the photograph of Freud as well as a number of other shots available in the Rohauer print. Also missing the portrait, and somewhat close to the “restored” print in Munich but without all the titles, is an English version of the film available in this country through West-Glen. I shall have something more to say on these various prints of the film below.

3. I am excluding from this category several films in which psychotherapists perform similar ameliorative roles, but which do not quite fit the category I am defining. I exclude, most notably, The Three Faces of Eve (1957) because the focus is more on the sensational issue of multiple personalities than the therapeutic alliance, David and Lisa (1963) because the film is most concerned with the pathologies and relationship of the two main characters, and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1973) because the film, though certainly about the therapeutic alliance, does not follow the particular narrative structure of mystery and discovery that I will be describing in the following pages.

4. No mention of the film appears in a recent history of the psychiatrist in cinema by Gabbard and Gabbard.

5. I shall directly translate the German titles from the Munich print since they are likely to be the original titles and since the English translation in the Rohauer print seems to me more discursive and melodramatic. Spellbound begins with similar titles extolling the merits of psychoanalysis in “open[ing] the locked doors of [the] mind.”

6. The story of the genesis of the film from the perspective of Freud and his circle is told in detail in Chodorkoff and Baxter. Friedberg also gives an account of the film's genesis.

7. I am grateful to Jan-Christopher Horak, Director of the Filmmuseum in the Münchner Stadtmuseum, for making a copy of the screenplay available, and to my colleague Peter Bauland for his help in translating the German.

8. I am grateful to the Deutsches Institut For Filmkunde in Wiesbaden-Biebrich, Germany, for a photocopy of this work.

9. Browne and McPherson cite this quotation from The Interpretation of Dreams and then refer to Derrida's “Freud and the Scene of Writing” in which the French philosopher discusses Freud's discovery of an adequate model for the operations of the mind in “Note on the Mystic Writing Pad” (36).

10. In Psychotherapy, published in 1909, Münsterberg clearly argued against the unconscious as developed by Freud and argued instead for one filled with memories and learning, one directly connected to but unnoticed by the conscious mind (15-26).

11. Interpretation as the single most important activity in literary criticism received much emphasis from the New Criticism that was so pervasive in the years following the second world war, an emphasis that was not diminished by the deconstructive movement. Indeed, deconstruction itself became an interpretive strategy, e.g., the work's meaning was the difficulty or impossibility of meaning (see Culler for a discussion of interpretation in the context of the New Criticism and deconstruction, 3-17). The New Criticism can be seen as part of the development of hermeneutics in Western thought from the writing of the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey in the late nineteenth century. Paul Ricoeur's Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation is essential reading for understanding the relationship of Freud's thinking to hermeneutics.

12. See especially Tomashevsky's “Thématique,” 267-69.

13. An obvious example of this process takes place in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) when the psychiatrist at the end of the film explains the mystery and the pathology of Norman Bates that has been responsible for that mystery; but in such films as Robert Siodmak's The Dark Mirror (1946) and Robert Benton's Still of the Night (1982) the psychotherapy plays a more pervasive and crucial role in solving an external mystery.

14. Variations on this theme appear in Stanley Kramer's Home of the Brave (1949) and Barbra Streisand's Prince of Tides (1991).

15. There is an interesting variation on this type of double exposure in Spellbound when the hero discovers his earliest trauma, his reaction as a young boy to his accidental killing of his brother, and, as a result, then remembers the more recent trauma that has caused his present amnesia, his reaction to the murder of the doctor. In this film the solving of the two internal mysteries frees the character from suspicion and allows for the solution to an external mystery.

16. The “restored” version in the Munich Museum and the West-Glen print begin with the opening titles concerning psychoanalysis followed by the narrative itself, which begins with a shot of the husband sharpening his razor and then a mirror shot of him shaving himself—this entire shaving sequence is missing from the narrative proper in the Rohauer print, which begins with the husband entering his wife's bedroom. While the husband is identified as Martin Fellman in Dr. Orth's notebook as well as on two occasions during the film and his wife's cousin is identified as Erich at the end of his letter to the couple in the Rohauer print, their names are totally missing from both the Munich and West-Glen prints.

17. Sachs uses the word “Fehlhandlung” or faulty action instead of Freud's “Fehlleistung” or faulty function. The editor of the Standard Edition of Freud's works tells us that no equivalent term to “Fehlleistung” existed in English and the word “parapraxis” had to be invented (1901, viii).

18. A point also made by Browne and McPherson in their discussion of the film's oedipal theme.

19. A relationship first touched upon by Chodorkoff and Baxter.

20. Freud at first identified the loved object with the self because his theory of homosexuality was partly based on the life of Leonardo da Vinci, who was raised for the first three years of his life without a father (1910, 98-100). Since the husband's father is totally absent in Secrets of A Soul such an interpretation has some credence, but the oedipal elements in the film clearly show the husband's identification of the cousin with his father. It is certainly possible that the strong mother and the absence of the father in early childhood can later produce a homosexual configuration where the love object represents both the self and the missing father, a fusion that further compensates for the parental absence. Later, in “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality,” Freud argued that homosexuality may be induced by the high regard for the male organ and also by either regard for the father or fear of him (in the later case his danger is removed by making him the loved object). Both “the clinging to a condition of the penis in the object, as well as the retiring in favor of the father—may be ascribed to the castration complex” (231).

21. The analyst points out that the husband is cured because he is now holding a knife. Abreaction is a type of catharsis, normally achieved through language, that frees the patient from an affect that is the product of some early trauma. The concept is associated with Freud's early work on hysteria and was frequently achieved through hypnosis, though some form of abreaction continued to be sought in psychoanalytic treatment under certain conditions. Many films featuring psychotherapy, including most of the salvational psychoanalytic films, use abreaction as the denouement of their plots because of its dramatic nature.

22. The work has generally been judged as visually interesting but intellectually superficial (see, for example, Kracauer's assessment, 170-72).

23. There are obviously more interpretive possibilities than the series I have outlined here, each dependent on one's psychoanalytic leanings. In addition to 1) Dr. Orth's logical, though incomplete narrative; 2) the oedipal interpretation as suggested by the film's visual imagery; 3) the implications of homosexual feelings between the two male figures from their interactions; and 4) my pre-oedipal reading, the film can easily support 5) an object-relations approach in terms of the husband's relationships with his mother and father as projected onto his involvement with his wife and her cousin; 6) a self-psychology interpretation through a focus on the husband's narcissistic injuries and the structure of his self.

24. He also states that “The preferred explanation for a series of symptoms tends to be cast in terms of single events—the primal scene is the outstanding example” (144).

25. The titles in this portion of the Rohauer version appear as subtitles, except for the last part of this explanation that appears as intertitles. The West-Glen and “restored” versions use only subtitles for the analyst's explanation.

26. In the screenplay, the oedipal significance of this photograph is underscored when the wife and her cousin are described as playing husband and wife with a cradle and doll while the husband watches sadly from a distance. Later that night, the husband again looks at the photograph which seems to undergo a strange transformation before his eyes: both his wife and cousin grow older continuing to play mother and father, while he remains the young child looking sadly on.

27. The husband remembers that at this Christmas celebration his mother gave him her new baby to hold. In his mind, he must have felt that he was no longer the play father, but his own father, and his little sibling was his and his mother's child. When his wife, as the little girl, felt deserted by him as a result of his mother's action and gave the doll to her cousin, the husband conflated the two women in his mind and felt rejected by his mother. Because the husband associated the little girl with his mother, he, in fact, also became the doll that she gave to the cousin, and the girl and her cousin his parents. The doll in his memory is related to the doll that his wife holds while in the boat with her cousin at the end of the husband's dream, when he dreams his own birth.

28. August Ruhs suggests that the man with the camera is the husband's father reminding us of the filmmaker with his constant cinematic references to the primal scene beneath the sublimated events of the film itself (31). Browne and McPherson also relate the primal scene to this photograph and the husband's memory of the photograph being shot (44).

29. I refer not only to the large number of classes on film now part of psychoanalytic training and the multitude of lectures on films given by psychoanalysts, but also to such groups as The Forum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film in Washington, D.C., which promote these activities as well as further communication between analysts and film scholars on the subject of film.

References

Abraham, Karl. 1924. “A Short Study of the Development of the Libido, Viewed in the Light of Mental Disorders.” Selected Papers. London: Hogarth Press, 1927. 418-501.

Baudry, Jean Louis. 1970. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Trans. Alan Williams. Film Quarterly 28 (1974-75). 39-47.

Bettelheim, Bruno. Freud and Man's Soul. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1983.

Blum, Harold P. Reconstruction in Psychoanalysis: Childhood Revisited and Recreated. Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1994.

Browne, Nick and Bruce McPherson. “Dream and Photography in a Psychoanalytic Film: Secrets of A Soul.” Dreamworks 1 (Spring 1980): 35-45.

Chodorkoff, Bernard and Seymour Baxter. “Secrets of a Soul: An Early Psychoanalytic Film Venture.” American Imago 31 (Winter 1974): 319-34.

Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Eberwein, Robert T. Film and the Dream Screen: A Sleep and a Forgetting. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Freud, Sigmund and Karl Abraham. A Psycho-Analytic Dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham. Ed. Hilda C. Abraham and Ernst L. Freud. Trans. Bernard Marsh and Hilda C. Abraham. London: The Hogarth Press, 1965.

Freud, Sigmund. 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74. Vols. 4 and 5.

———. 1901. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Standard Edition. Vol. 6.

———. 1910. “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood.” Standard Edition. 11: 59-137.

———. 1922. “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality.” Standard Edition. 18: 221-32.

———. 1925. “A Note Upon a Mystic Writing Pad.” Standard Edition. 19: 226-232.

———. 1937. “Construction in Analysis.” Standard Edition. 23: 256-269.

Friedberg, Anne. “An Unheimlich Maneuver between Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: Secrets of a Soul (1926).” The Films of G. W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema. 1990. Ed. Eric Rentschler. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. 41-51.

Gabbard, Krin and Glen O. Gabbard. Psychiatry and the Cinema. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.

Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 3: The Last Phase, 1919-39. New York: Basic Books, 1957.

Klein, Melanie. 1932. The Psycho-Analysis of Children. Trans. Alix Strachey. Revised H. A. Thorner. New York: Delacorte, 1975.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Sorcerer and his Magic.” Structural Anthropology. Trans. Clair Jacobson and Brooke Grudfest Shoepf. Anchor Books. New York: Doubleday, 1967. 161-80.

Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

Münsterberg, Hugo. Psychotherapy. New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1912.

———. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. New York: D. Appleton, 1916.

Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

Ross, Colin and Hans Neumann. Manuscript. Die Geheimnisse der Seele, Psychoanalytisches Filmwerk. Zweiter Teil: Das Geheimnis einer Seele, Ein Psychoalytisches Kammerspiel. Berlin: Kulturabteilung der UFA, n.d.

Ruhs, August. “Geheimnisse Einer Seele: Ein Freud-Loses Projekt.” G. W. Pabst. Ed. Gottfried Schlemmer, Bernard Riff, and Georg Haberl. Münster: Maks Publikationen, 1990. 20-32.

Sachs, Hanns. Psychoanalyse: Rätsel des Unbewussten. Berlin: Lichtbild-Bühne, 1926.

Spence, Donald P. Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982.

Tomashevsky, Boris. “Thématique.” Théorie de la littérature. Ed. Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965. 263-307.

Additional coverage of Pabst's life and career is contained in the following source published by the Gale Group: International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers: Directors, Vol. 2.