Hollywood has always exhibited a fascination with Freudian psychoanalysis. In movies, hysterical women and guilty men spend copious amounts of time on the couch; charlatan doctors play wealthy women for their money or hypnotize them with disastrously comic results and corrupt ones use hypnosis to make patients carry out their bidding. How many scenes can you recall of patients lying on analyst’s couches or asking whether they should lie down on analyst’s couches or being hypnotized by bright lights or the mesmerizing gaze of a charismatic fiend? Every genre from light comedy to supernatural thriller has utilized the familiar images of psychoanalysis and hypnosis. Though you may never have enlisted the services of a mental health professional yourself, the language of psychoanalysis is familiar to you through its very reductive representation in Hollywood films.
In honor of the 150th anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s birth I would like to celebrate his pioneering work in hypnosis as a cure for hysteria and repressed trauma with a double feature movie night. Though there are more appropriate films available than anyone could watch in a single sitting, my personal choices would be Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 Spellbound with Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman and the 1948 cult classic The Snake Pit starring Olivia de Havilland and directed by Anatole Litvak (Sorry, Wrong Number). These two films cover the use of hypnosis in addressing guilt induced psychosis, dream analysis, and the ever popular electroshock therapy. In case you're looking for some conversational ice breakers, here are some links to get you started.
Hollywood's Crazy Idea of Mental Hospitals
How Hypnosis Works
History of Hypnosis
Interpret Your Dreams
Mesmerism
Women and Hysteria
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