Smoking, Laughing, and the Compulsion to Film: On the Beginnings of Psychoanalytic Documentaries

Marinelli, Lydia. Barber, Christopher.

American Imago, Volume 61, Number 1, Spring 2004, pp. 35-58 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/aim.2004.0016

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aim/summary/v061/61.1marinelli.html

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Lydia Marinelli

35 LYDIA MARINELLI

Smoking, Laughing, and the Compulsion to Film: On the Beginnings of Psychoanalytic Documentaries
The projectionist has informed us that the pictures would be enjoyed much more and would be clearer if fewer people were smoking. Announcement made by Philip R. Lehrman during the screening of the film Sigmund Freud, His Family, and Colleagues, 19281947

Blue Haze Scene: The cigar is thrown away with a hasty, almost annoyed gesturesmoking is prohibited during the shooting, but only for the star. He complies with the injunction unwillingly and only after it has been repeated several times. The tribute that he must pay to the camera is nothing less than the renunciation of the insignia by which the public identifies him. Contrastingly, the supporting actors smoke continually, as if their cigarettes had to compensate for this lost signifier. The forbidden cigar and the rising clouds of smoke that blur the images are among the most important props of the film. When one follows the blue haze back into the history of psychoanalysis, the impression arises that the film has taken as its model Wilhelm Stekels Conversations on Smoking, a 1903 account in dialogue form of the first psychoanalysts at the Wednesday Society meetings in the Prager Tagblatt in which an unbreakable connection is posited between psychoanalysis, tobacco, and the disappearance of metaphysics: Could not the decline of the metaphysical sciences, the retreat of philosophy before the other sciences, be attributed to the widespread vice of combining mental exertion with smoking? (1926,
American Imago, Vol. 61, No. 1, 3558. 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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543), asks an unnamed psychoanalyst, who is the only one present to have renounced the habit.1 Although the film containing the miniature episode of the cigar does not reenact Stekels primal scene of the psychoanalytic movement, it does possess the distinction of being the first known documentary about Freud and the early psychoanalysts. It was made by Philip R. Lehrman, who with his family journeyed from New York to Vienna in 1928 for the purpose of undergoing a didactic analysis with Freud. Using footage shot in the course of that year, Sigmund Freud, His Family, and Colleagues, 19281947 was later edited by Lehrman with the help of his daughter Lynne Lehrman Weiner. It has in the interim become commonplace for scholars of both film and psychoanalysis to draw attention to the synchronicity of these epiphonemena of modern culture and to seek in the latter a method for dissecting the former. It is likewise conventional to note the absence of comments by Freud himself regarding film and for the parallels to be explored on a purely theoretical level, often with the aid of The Interpretation of Dreams.2 In the present paper, however, I am primarily concerned with elucidating how a detailed historical perspective that makes use of new sources and extends beyond Freud can open up a whole host of illuminating questions. Utilizing Lehrmans psychoanalytic documentary as a springboard, a consideration of the convergence of the histories of film and psychoanalysis, which has long been centered on feature films, can be expanded to include films in whose creation psychoanalysts were involved not only in front of but also behind the camera. By reconstructing the conditions under which these cinematographic products came into existence, I hope to give a new theoretical accent to the lively discussion already in progress regarding the relations between psychoanalysis and film. Conflicting Images Having emigrated from the Russian city of Plissa at the age of nine, Lehrman studied medicine in New York. In 1920 he started a medical practice there, and a short time later he began training as an analyst under Abraham Arden Brill, who

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provided the connection to Freud. Lehrman had already been to Vienna in 1926, but without his camera and without the opportunity to have analysis sessions with Freud, who wrote to him on April 6: it is commendable that you are seeking a wellfounded training in psychoanalysis. You are certainly right that this is more likely to be achieved in Europe, in Vienna or Berlin, than in America.3 However, an analysis with Freud did not come to pass, and a second attempt was necessary. Brill, who had often sent patients from the U.S.A. and thus had contributed to supplementing Freuds scanty income during the postwar years, continued to solicit Freud on behalf of his friend and colleague. During Lehrmans second stay in Europe, the movie camera turned out to be as helpful an ally in achieving the desired analysis as smoking had been in fueling the psychoanalytic critique of metaphysics. Lehrman rightly surmised that he would again run into difficulties in 1928. Freud had had another cancer operation, and it remained uncertain when and if he would find the time for new analysands. Not knowing what exactly awaited him in Vienna, Lehrman decided in the course of the summer to postpone the journey no longer and instead to while away the time in Europe with his new state-ofthe-art sixteen-millimeter Bell and Howard camera. He was encouraged by a letter from Freud that, although it did not promise an analysis right away, presented the attraction of an agreeable summer retreat at Semmering. On March 11, 1928, Freud had informed him of his conditions: Dear Dr. Lehrman, I see no fundamental obstacle why I should not accept you for an analysis. But as my time is very much restricted I am not ready to bind myself before I heard more about you. I could take you on October first this year, coming back from Semmering. A period of about nine month (until next years vacation in June) would seem a proper time for a thorough analysis. I would prefer if it could be done in German, but that is no serious obstacle (You need the knowledge of German if you intend to hear lectures or examine cases here). My fee is $25 an hour. I expect your further communications. Yours truly Freud

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Brought along mostly as a way of passing the time until the start of the analysis, the little camera proved to be an instrument that created an eye-catching cross-cut of private family mementoes, psychoanalytic history, andperhaps most surprisinglycinematic symptomatology. Even though these sequences, often shot with an unsteady hand, seem at first glance to be extremely casual, the film that Lehrman later put together from these images and commented upon shows several peculiarities that can be ascribed to the interplay resulting from analysts being both in front of and behind the camera. To meet Freud, who was convalescing in the Schloss Tegel Sanatorium and thus at first not in a position to begin treating his American patient, Lehrman had to travel on from Vienna to Berlin. Thanks to this journey, Lehrman obtained footage showing the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and the Ernst Simmel Sanatorium. Nonetheless, his star continued to refuse to appear on camera. Lehrman had to wait several months before he succeeded in changing Freuds mind. Since it was difficult simply to do nothing and wait, he filmed Freuds colleagues in Berlin, traveled to Paris to visit Marie Bonaparte, and, upon his return to Vienna, began filming other members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He created portraits of more than seventy psychoanalysts; in several cases his footage contains the only surviving pictures. For a long time the film reels went unnoticed in Lehrmans private collections, and he never mentioned their existence in any of his publications. Finally, in the early 1950s, prodded by his daughter Lynne Lehrman Weiner, he started working through the material. Sections of the uncut footage were shown at an American Psychoanalytic Association convention in 1950, and the audiences enthusiasm led to a repetition of the screening in 1954. Both times Lehrman annotated the films through a microphone, and the recordings of his commentary and the audiences reaction contributed an important element of the later version. Stimulated by the success of these presentations, he made a compilation in 1955 that spliced highlights of the silent footage into a twenty-minute film. This first edited version continued to eschew the use of sound, but did feature subtitles. At that time many of the people who had

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been filmed could not be identified, with the result that only the better-known analysts were shown in addition to Freud and his family. This first compilation continued to be handled as a private film, and only one copy found its way into the Sigmund Freud Archives, where, however, it was immediately put under lock and key until 2057. Lynne Lehrman Weiner was more than a little surprised when she learned about this policy of the Freud Archives, whose logic is at times not very apparent.4 In this instance, the reason is to be found in the image of Freud presented by the film, which strikingly contrasts with more conventional depictions. Superficially, the film appears to be an everyday amateur effort, which, conforming to the naive representational intentions of private films, shows family members traveling and professional associates in a sort of happy family of analytic pioneers. The silent images of analysts waving to the camera, Freud strolling about, and a party at Marie Bonapartes in Paris do not at first betray anything to distinguish them from other family films, which cannot be accused of being offensive or incriminating. But in the eyes of certain people, the pictures of Freud captured by Lehrman had become disagreeable. During her research for a new film version, Lehrman Weiner sought the advice of various psychoanalysts in order to identify the many faces that remained unknown. Anna Freud was among those contacted, but she refused to cooperate. It was not Freuds oft-cited shyness toward film that made her unwilling to help. In Lehrmans films, Anna Freud found herself confronted with an image of her father that in no way corresponded to what she wanted to establish for posterity. It is well known how much care she took in steering the memory of her father into certain channels. In addition to controlling the scientific reception of Freuds works through rigid management of their editions, Anna Freud also attempted to mold her fathers public image in a visually dominated culture. In the domain of film and popular culture, her efforts were much less successful than they were within the psychoanalytic world, ending eventually in capitulation in the face of an explosion of images. On many occasions Anna Freud distanced herself from attempts to film her fathers life storyfor instance, in the case

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of John Huston. Although Freud himself harshly rejected film producers who sought to win his cooperation, the film industry continued to approach the family after World War II. In his plan to make a Freud film, John Huston met with a maximum of resistance. Despite his pleas that he intended to make a serious film and not a popular spectacle, and despite attempts to convince the family that continued for more than ten years, Anna Freud rejected any form of authorization and mobilized Viennese psychoanalysts who had emigrated to the U.S. against the project. When Huston decided to release the film without the familys approval, Anna Freud was forced to admit to Masud Khan on July 12, 1970 that she had not been able to protect her own father against becoming a film hero (YoungBruehl 1988, 358).5 Anna Freuds idea of an acceptable representation of her father can be clearly reconstructed through consideration of the conflict over the Lehrman footage. After initial hesitation, she herself began to review film material in the familys possession and agreed to provide the commentary for the resulting compilation, Sigmund Freud, 19301939. This film, which later became the official home movie of psychoanalysis, spliced together excerpts shot during the thirties by members of the Freud family, Marie Bonaparte, Ruth Mack Brunswick, Mark Brunswick, and others, along with historical scenes including the march of the National Socialists into Vienna. On one occasion, the idea of releasing films for commercial use had already arisen. Mark Brunswick, who had fallen into financial difficulty, suggested selling the footage that he had shot in Vienna as a way of financing his analysis. This plan aroused both the professional and familial disapproval of Anna Freud, who at the time was still using all available means to prevent this private material from appearing on public screens. Her attitude cannot be explained through a general urge to censor. It points out a fundamental problem in the use of sources that emerge from the private into the public sphere. Such a change of status also applies to documentary films where it is unclear if the images were made with the consent of the persons shown and if they were initially created exclusively for a very specific circle of viewers. The question of consent, and with it of the legitimate public use of film, dominates the

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discussion among anthropologists, but it also applies to other forms of documentary, and is not to be simplistically equated with censorship. It was years later that Anna Freud, knowing that Lehrman Weiner wanted to release a similar documentary, changed her position and agreed to allow excerpts from the footage in her own archive to be compiled under her name. In this authorized documentary, Freud is shown as a family man and doglover, appearing in his summer domiciles and London exile in everyday situations that were mostly contrived for the camera. To the eye of the uninvolved observer, what differentiates these scenes from Lehrmans footage is hardly perceivable, and yet it was described by Lehrman Weiner as follows: He [Lehrman] cared because Anna Freud apparently did not like the idea that these pictures were so good that they showed Freuds wound on his cheek. He had cancer of the mouth, and he was in pain a lot from 1923 on. He was in pain almost every day of his life, and she didnt want it known. She also declined to help me identify people because she said she didnt approve of making films public. She thought if the general public were to see him in the distress he was in that it would take away from his intellect. To have anybody say anything negative was a tremendous source of horror for her. (Green 2000, 3) Compared to the later films, Lehrmans footage retained a reality effect that was too strong for Anna Freud and disturbed her ongoing project of preserving an unblemished public image of Freud. Anna Freuds attempts to control the contours of her fathers image were not only a product of later debate; their origins can be traced in the footage itself. The scene mentioned at the beginning, showing Freud reluctantly throwing away his cigar, provides a paradigm for this publicrelations effort. Wrapped in thick fur coats, Sigmund and Anna Freud stroll through the wintry streets near their apartment. For a moment Freud holds a cigar in his hand, only to throw it hastily to the ground following a gesture made by Anna. The rest of the scenes in which they appear together

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show Freud in the unaccustomed role of the nonsmoker. Lehrman later reported that Anna, upon seeing the camera pointed at them, had demanded that her father throw the cigar away immediately. He was, after all, a man with a serious illness, and posterity was not to be given the impression that he was an undisciplined addict.6 Since he found it difficult to comply with the smoking prohibition, he violated it with pleasure in the scenes without Anna. The shots of a fragile little Freud being admonished by his daughter apparently contradicted her ideas. Despite being a compilation that makes use of seemingly everyday family footage, Lehrmans film in no way comes across to todays viewer as a sentimental souvenir. Compared to the static nature of later Freud films, the images assembled by Lehrman range from sentimental details to scenes reminiscent of silent-film slapstick in which overly enthusiastic dogs threaten to bowl Freud over, only to turn on the camera itself to the directors chagrin. These sequences are not the sort that could be used to project the image of Freud as a dignified researcher and scholar. Through Anna Freuds unexpected reaction, Lehrman Weiner discovered that she had not only inherited unique material from her father, but that his film had the potential to impact the official iconography of psychoanalysis. She did not, however, let herself be daunted by the restrictions and continued to seek out possibilities for compiling all of the footage into a work that would be at least twice as long as the original. She made stills of the unknown faces and sent them to numerous psychoanalytic associations in the hope of clarifying their identity. Thus she was able to compile an almost complete list of the persons shown. In 1985, she finally succeeded, with the financial support of the New Land Foundation and the New York Psychoanalytic Association, in restoring the film and producing a new, extended version entitled Sigmund Freud, His Family, and Colleagues, 19281947. Lehrman Weiner also experienced doubt as to whether the images that had been created in private and initially safeguarded as an intimate family document could be exposed to the public eye without further ado. She solved the problem by not releasing the film for public distribution, instead passing it on to several scientific archives and for the most part deciding herself on the sites

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for screening.7 This policy helps in part to explain why documentary films created by psychoanalysts themselves were for a long time overlooked in discussions of the parallels between cinema and psychoanalysis. The New Version The new version grew to a length of fifty minutes, fittingly corresponding to an analytic session. A short introduction was added in which Lynne Lehrman Weiner discusses how the film came to be divided into two parts.8 On the visual level, as I have noted, the original film gave the impression of a conventional amateur effort, showing family members traveling and very brief shots of adherents of the psychoanalytic movement. The new film includes in its entirety the older shorter version, complete with subtitles, in its first section, which for the most part is set in Europe. Because Lehrman was forced to work in daylight, the footage made using the small hand camera was almost always shot outdoors or by a window. Conditions were harsh for the subjects, especially those in Vienna who had to endure one of the centurys coldest winters. Despite the films title, its first part begins with sequences from New York in 1927 in which several members of the Vanderbilt Clinic staff are introduced. Dramaturgic intervention in the material is limited to rearrangement of the footage that was shot in Europe over the course of a year, which is not shown chronologically but spliced together according to place and groups of people. When Freud in 1928 had to interrupt his summer holidays to undergo treatment at the Schloss Tegel sanatorium, Lehrman did not hesitate to travel to Berlin to make contact with colleagues there. Impressions of Berlins street life, into which Lehrman erroneously inserted the Vienna Opera, are followed by footage of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, which opened at its new address during Freuds stay.9 In addition to such well-known analysts as Ernst Simmel, Sndor Rad, Franz Alexander, Max Eitingon, and Harald Schultz-Hencke, one finds others who have received less attention, including Moshe Wulff and Erich Kraft.

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A trip to Paris supplied footage of a family meal in Marie Bonapartes garden and gave Lehrman the opportunity to visit the clinic in Sainte-Anne. Thus the first French analysts are shown with representatives of diverse other disciplines. Georges Dumas and Georges Parcheminey appear as a harmonious pair, although the former, as an adherent of Pierre Janet, made fun of the psychoanalytic conception of sexuality and its allegedly German character. The second led the psychoanalytic ward of Sainte-Anne Clinic and was working on a psychoanalytically based psychosomatic theory. Among these heterogenous group shots from Paris, one also finds a prolonged focus on the physician and amateur ethnologist Gustave Le Bon, of whom Marie Bonaparte was an admirer and student. Le Bon, over ninety years old, demonstratively holds Psychologie des foules up to the camera for several seconds to make clear that Freuds mass psychology took his theories as a point of departure. The longest segment of the first part is devoted to members of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society. The icy cold of the 1928/29 winter forced Lehrman to shoot a number of indoor scenes despite the poor lighting conditions. Robert Wlder, Paul Federn, and Adolf J. Storfer are shown in the offices of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, concentrating on a book or busily talking on the phonescenes that were set up for the film to give the impression of a bit of action, as Lehrman stresses in his commentary. Isidor Sadger also appeared at the Verlag, allowing himself to be immortalized as one its oldest members. The footage that shows him most likely provides the only surviving pictures of this analyst and psychiatrist, who was killed in 1942 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. It is not always Lehrman who guides the viewers gaze. Sometimes the camera playfully passes from the filmer to the filmed. At one point Wilhelm Reich films Lehrman; at another Anna Freud attempts with a shaky hand to get her father into view, with little success. In addition to the family and both of Freuds sisters, Paula Winternitz and Rosa Graf, Lehrman filmed almost all of the Viennese psychoanalysts during those winter months. A group shot, which futilely attempts to hold together the numerous analysts in front of St. Stephens

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Cathedral, turns out to be a highpoint of the Austrian scenes: Federn, Hitschmann, Jokl, Richard Sterba, Federn, Hitschmann . . . can be heard off-camera. The figures walk off the screen only suddenly to come back on again although it was already anothers turn, costing the commentator, who had not reckoned with such an unruly mob, quite a bit of effort to keep them all straight. The shorter second part of the film is compiled from material shot in New York in the forties and has commentary by Lynne Lehrman Weiner. A shift from black-and-white to color corresponds with the change of setting from Europe to the U.S.A., an odyssey that many of the persons shown had themselves undergone in the course of fleeing National Socialism. On the screen, American analysts ride on horseback through Central Park. In the case of Sidney Klein, Lehrman Weiner cannot resist cracking a joke: Freud, who had a great wit, perhaps might have commented that Kleins frequent equestrian display of masculine dominance could have been compensation for the meaning of Klein in German. The film concludes with images from Brills birthday party in 1947, where Lehrman attempts to recreate a shot that he had taken in Vienna with Freud. It is quite apparent that Brill liked posing in front of the camera more than his predecessor. Because Freud had only ventured halfway into the sunlight in the corresponding Semmering shot, he remains a shadowy outline, while Brill eagerly positions himself in the blazing sun. Analysts of Film on Film After this last scene with Brill, which despite being an homage to Freud seems also to compensate for his unwillingness to expose himself to the camera, the question arises whether the film simply juxtaposed people who happened to be practitioners of the psychoanalytic profession. To determine whetherand, if so, howLehrman disclosed a new facet to the affinity between cinema and psychoanalysis, parameters must be established to measure their association. Since I cannot discuss these interrelationships in detail here, I will limit myself to presenting four points of view associated

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with analysts actually captured by Lehrman on celluloid who embody both the theoretical and practical involvement of their era with film. On the one hand, the four positions exemplified by the individual psychoanalysts serve as an external point of orientation for Lehrmans work. On the other hand, a focus on the analysts captured in the film brings to light associations that have gone unnoticed in the relevant literature. Not all younger analysts shared Freuds aversion to the film world. Several of them are known to have visited cinemas in their leisure time, although this private indulgence never found its way into their public statements.10 They shared the attitude of the casual moviegoer who with pleasure gives in to the power of the medium but abstains from exacting critical observation. Franz Alexander, whom Lehrman met in Berlin, can be numbered among these amateurs. As a fan of Chaplins films, he seized the opportunity to get to know the actor and director personally in the United States. At an intimate dinner in Chicago in 1936, he attempted to obtain Chaplins explanation regarding his immortal figure of the tramp, without, however, passing on the results to anyone at a later date.11 What characterizes Alexanders approach, and is carried over by many other analytic moviegoers, is the preference given to the actor instead of the role acted. In this biographical reading, film characters derive from the same motivations that impel actors in their personal experiences. Neither the special nature of the medium nor the technique of acting forms the point of departure for this mode of analytic inquiry, which employs paradigms derived from pathography. Although the regressions that cinema encourages in the viewer are at the forefront of later psychoanalytic film theory, the first analysts themselves often fell prey to a form of theoretical regression that denied them access to the full range of their own methodological possibilities. At the beginning of Lehrmans film, the request is heard in the background that the audience stop smoking for a short period so that the images can be seen more clearly. On a metaphorical level, the early analysts did not heed this advice. Although they had euphorically explored other cultural forms (such as literature and the visual arts) since the inception of the Wednesday Society meetings, their

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relation to cinema vacillated, like that of the smoker to cigarettes, between attraction and repulsion. Only much later did the plumes begin to disperse and cinema, with all of its peculiarities, become visible in psychoanalytic work. One of the first to discover film as a medium to be analyzed in its own right was Hanns Sachs, in whose wake there followed a multitude of psychoanalytic interpretations. His endeavors inaugurate the second stage in the relations between psychoanalysis and film. At exactly the same time as Lehrman filmed Sachs in Berlin, Sachs was composing the short text On the Psychology of Film (1929). On the basis of works by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Lubitsch, he adopts a perspective that differentiates him from many of his successors. To be sure, Sachs does undertake symbolic interpretations, but at several points he displays a sensitivity to cinematographic aspects in a narrower sense. In contrast to most other analysts, who concentrate on characters and dramatic motifs, Sachs turns his attention to the dialectic of form and content in film. He devotes himself to specific expressive techniques by pursuing the question of how the psychological phenomenon of tension can arise in this medium. He correlates Eisensteins montage principles and seemingly meaningless gestures that escape awareness, thereby coupling the development of silent film with the theory of parapraxis. The head movement of the sentry sent to the firing squad in Battleship Potemkin (1925), which for a short moment lingers seemingly free of context, becomes for Sachs a cinematic gesture that escapes consciousness and toys with casualness. The parallel succeeds because the image is on the screen for an interval too short to be perceived consciously (Sachs 1929, 123).12 Ren Allendy, whom Lehrman filmed in Paris, was also among the first analysts to take into consideration the special nature of film. He was in contact with Eisenstein and investigated (1927) the emotional effect of film images. Allendy contrasted real images with those symbolically interpreted in movies in order to derive points of correspondence with unconscious process. Following Bergsons linking of optical images with memory, he conceptualizes cinematic images as recollected phenomena that call forth unconscious states (75 103). Thus film has specific effects at its disposal that are to be

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related less to logical and waking than to regressive forms of thought. Allendys orientation toward the viewer and his or her structures of consciousness anticipates a line of thinking that did not reappear in psychoanalytic film theory until it was taken up by Christian Metz (1977) and Jean-Louis Baudry (1978). A third, rather eccentric, meeting between psychoanalysis and cinema manifests itself in the form of the analyst as actor. It probably comes as no surprise that excursions into the thespian art are not among psychoanalysts most frequent modes of involvement with film, and perhaps this is not to be regretted. Thus it is all the more worth mentioning one of the rare instances of an analyst who was also an actor. Adrien Borel, whom Lehrman filmed in Paris in 1928, was a psychiatrist and founding member of the Socit Psychanalytique de Paris, and his reputation primarily unfolded in the world of artists and intellectuals. His analysis of Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille had a major impact on their writing, as both of them later noted.13 Borels artistic contacts also landed him a role in a film that seemed to be tailor-made for him. In The Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Robert Bresson cast almost all of the supporting roles with amateur actors. In a story that centers on the inner drama of a dying young priest, Borel under the pseudonym of Andr Guibert played an older priest. Bresson liked the results and decided to realize his future projects primarily with amateur actors. Whether he ever put other psychoanalysts in front of the camera has not yet been investigated. The fourth and rather controversial link is found in the phenomenon of the psychoanalytic scriptwriter. A number of articles have investigated Sachss work on G. W. Pabsts Secrets of the Soul (192526) and Siegfried Bernfelds attempt to create a cinematic alternative to this commercial project.14 Lehrmans film presents these two analysts as harmonious coworkers at the Berlin Institute. The task of scriptwriting raised the difficult question of whether psychoanalysis could be represented on the screen, and if so how. Whereas Sachs opted for a conventional feature-film plot that elucidated the method and functioning of psychoanalytic therapy and advanced teleologically toward the cure of a patient, Bernfeld, in the context of a

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full-length film that incorporated the visual effects found in more advanced contemporary cinema, used the medium reflexively in a variety of ways in his design for a cinematic depiction of Freudian psychoanalysis.15 A remarkable trait of his draft script, which was never realized, is that it attempts to reveal the congruence between film technology and the functioning of the Freudian psyche. Film actors appear in his script explicitly as film actors; characteristic elements from other films such as Robert Wienes The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) are integrated; themes from Cowboy-and-Indian films populate the dream-images. In one scene, the cinematographic apparatus itself in the form of a projector throws images from the external world onto the ceiling of the interior of a spatial construction corresponding to the scene of psychic events. Bernfeld develops a logic of the film in the psyche by incorporating reflections of the technical parameters similar to those used in feature films from the period. The projector serves as a metaphor for psychic processes and at the same time produces images that reappear as the day-residues in dreams. Compared with the depiction of the psychoanalytic cure in Secrets of the Soul, Bernfeld puts much more emphasis on self-analytic methods. Sounds and Symptoms In view of these heretofore uncharted connections between theory and practice in psychoanalytic film studies, one might conclude that Lehrman has merely furnished posterity with an archive whose value as an analytic project lags far behind that of the more sophisticated positions presented above. From the standpoint of genre, the twofold meaning of the label documentary film of psychoanalysis now seems to have opened an overly wide semantic field. Admittedly, Lehrmans cinematographic presentation of psychoanalysts is compiled from private footage; in other words, it is a film about psychoanalysts. But does that make it a psychoanalytic film? Does it, beyond the profession of those shown, succeed in bringing us closer to psychoanalysis as such through its use of the cinematic medium?

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A first answer that suggests itself is that the psychoanalytic study of family relationships resulted in an institutional structure that likewise had the characteristics of a family. From this perspective, the history of psychoanalysis becomes a further example of the oedipal model presented by Freud in Totem and Taboo. Since Lehrmans film, in the style of a home movie, depicts images of a familial group, this could on the surface be enough to claim that it allegorically captures those harmonious moments from which the violent mythos emanates. The allure of this scenario derives from the correspondence of what seems today to be its technical deficiencies and its historical distance. The amateurish nature of the images, with their jarring cuts and sudden changes of lighting, evokes a sense of history because film itself is disclosing its own childhood as a technical medium. But viewed more closely, aspects of both the form and content of the film contradict the image of a purely familial movie. Although I have primarily considered the visual level of the material, it is the second formal levelthat of soundthat goes against the grain of family documents and adds undertones that divert the images from their course. When Lehrman obtained his hand-held camera, synchronized sound lay far in the future for amateur filmmakers. Until the 1950s, documentaries were forced to make do with different forms of audio accompaniment from feature films. Commentary from off-camera, the successor to musical accompaniment, was the only possible means of organizing the images acoustically (Kemner and Eisert 2000). As I have stated, Lehrman screened the first short version of his film for the American Psychoanalytic Association as a silent documentary, but he commented on the images live through a microphone. His daughter took the tape made on this occasion as the point of departure for her soundtrack, to which she added her own commentary on individuals her father had been unable to identify. But the soundtrack includes more than the fathers and daughters voices. In the background one can hear the reactions of the audience. Laughter, applause, and called-out names accompany the commentary and images. At one point the projectionist requests that the audience refrain from smoking. In this way there is an involuntary kaleidoscopic

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fracturing of the realistic conventions usually followed in privately made documentaries. The demand that the medium efface all signs of the technical means of production in favor of what is being depicted is one of the expectations laid down for the realistic feature film, as well as for the cinma vrit documentary (Colleyn 1993). Lehrmans film does not go after this mode of immediate reality. Instead, the polyphony of unseen voices breaks the frame of referentiality at multiple points. Without overdoing the father-daughter relationship, I would say that the effect produced by the interplay of the two commentators is to destabilize the localization of the narrative. One voice describes in short sentences the appearance of the subjects, but the sound track takes a contrapuntal turn through the second, overlaid voice. What occurs when one speaker is interrupted by a second goes beyond the addition of supplementary factual knowledge. This doubling causes the commentary to lose its narrative authority as such. Gaps become apparent that would be glossed over by the continuous narration of only one commentator. The most unusual audio component is the babble of audience voices. Thus the film not only represents a visual, and later aural, record of analysts; it also uniquely undertakes to reproduce its own screening. Just as the voice of Philip R. Lehrman is interrupted by that of his daughter, the composite narrative voice is accompanied by a further multiplication of voices that can be heard in the room where the film is being shown. In the style of sitcoms and other TV shows, the reaction of the audience (in this case also comprised of analysts) accompanies the images, constructing a reference to a secondary screen that is not seen but heard. This gives the film its formal ambiguity. Todays viewer is confronted by an invisible Doppelgnger, which, as its reactions demonstrate, has a strong affective bond to what is being shown. Many of the people filmed, who in the meantime had emigrated from Europe (such as Richard and Editha Sterba or Jenny Wlder), were sitting in the audience during the sound recording and received a round of applause; one of the loudest was for Franz Alexander, who in his pinstriped suit reminds one of a Chicago movie gangster. The reactions also become an indicator for the

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diverging theoretical and institutional positions that are smoothed over by the films family-like visual surface. The laughter is stifled in an instant when Wilhelm Reich, who at the time of the screening was behind bars in a Maine prison, appears on the screen. An indecipherable murmuring is elicited by Ren Laforgue. He, as several of the people in the room well knew, had sought to cooperate with Mathias H. Gring. Through this seismographic monitoring of the audience, an image-for-image record of their reaction is created that turns the film into a sort of multiple exposure. While the commentators voice-over provides the pictures with an explanation, this narrative is punctuated by the more or less amused reaction of a public that is both internal and external. This aural self-referentiality can be added to those forms of mise en abme that Marc Vernet (1980, 230) has explored on the visual level. Vernet describes how, both technically through the use of projection mechanisms and materially in the play of shadows, the cinematography of feature films often creates an inner abyss (abme) through its own duplication. The multiple framing of images is a wellknown device in nineteenth-century painting, and Vernet shows that in film the result is to remove the boundary of the screen, causing the image to seem to free itself and to become an object in its own right. The technical procedures of cinema themselves become apparent at the visual level. Lehrman steers this process away from the means of production and toward the effects of cinema through the acoustic doubling of the audience. Thus the abyss opens not only on the screen, as theory oriented toward feature films proposes, but also in the screening room. Beyond the presence of the cameras eye, the viewer himself is put into a doubled body. Through this shift from a self-referentiality of technique to one of effect, one can discern a connection to the psychoanalytic reflections on cinema in a narrower sense. The orientation of reflexivity toward the viewer links Lehrmans film with both Bernfelds script and the work of Sachs and Allendy. For Sachs it is the moviegoers ways of seeing that are subverted by the cutting techniques used in films such as Eisensteins. Sachs makes a case for extending the symptomology described by Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which

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borrows from criminolology, to the phenomenon of cinematic tension because film has for its part borrowed techniques from literary or scientific criminolology that play with the receivers threshold of perception. Thus the cutting techniques used in film create psychic conditions in the viewer that operate at least partially within the framework of regression as described by psychoanalysis. Allendy too recognizes the role of regression by aligning cinematic images, alongside dream-images, with the Freudian category of primary-process thinking. This explains the enjoyment that cinematic images produce in the viewer. Although Allendy conceptualizes cinema as offering a hallucinatory wish-fulfillment without distinguishing it more precisely from dream states, Bernfeld develops a second line of psychoanalytic thinking, which has too long remained in the shadows, that acknowledges cinema to have other capacities beyond stimulating regression. His script, in a way similar to Lehrmans film, directly incorporates the technical apparatus, but Bernfelds integration of an analytically inspired project and cinematography arises under different auspices from Lehrmans. Lehrman excuses himself at the beginning of his film for its amateurish nature and delivers an unusual justification for the genesis of the images: This picture is the result of my work, my analysis with Freud, who at that time took my need to take pictures of him as a symptom. Parts of the film came into being in tandem with the directors analysis with Freud and are not to be seen as just a leisure-time diversion, but as directly linked to the analysis. The interplay of the camera and his own analysis, which Lehrman took as the point of departure for his film, most clearly differentiates his work from the aforementioned documentary of Freud by Anna Freud. It brings into play the potentials of cinematography that Bernfeld also attempted to incorporate into his script by drawing parallels between cinematic and analytic processes of knowledge. The synchronization of Lehrmans own analysis and the films images took an unexpected course. His analysis took place in the months between the shooting of the first footage and Freuds appearance before the camera. He attempted to shorten the period of waiting with the camera, but then the camera took on a new role with the beginning of the analysis.

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He primarily brought his camera along to Europe because he wanted to capture Freud on film, though Freud repeatedly resisted this wish. He was not in Vienna when Lehrman arrived, and in Berlin he could not be persuaded by his pursuer to appear on camera. To the contrary, Lehrmans habit of constantly hounding psychoanalysts with his Bell and Howard seemed to strengthen Freuds reservations toward Americans, and he complained to Brill about the new patient.16 If one takes Lehrman at his word, Freuds appearance before the camera required as many analytic sessions as the number of rolls of film the camera consumed. One no longer knows whether filming served the analysis or vice versa. A further difficulty delayed the beginning of the analysis. Although Lehrman underwent analytic treatment in order to further his professional training, Freud operated under the assumption that his analysand would have to develop a transference neurosis so that he could proceed with the treatment. At first Lehrman was not able to produce such a transference neurosis, but a solution was nonetheless found. Among the symptoms through which a transference neurosis manifests itself are various forms of compulsion, and because no other transference neurosis could be established, the compulsiveness with which Lehrman uninterruptedly filmed others as a substitute for his desire to film Freud was made into the point of departure of his analysis: Freud took my need to take pictures of him as a symptom. A symptom around which treatment could be started was thus found, but Freud did not want to appear before the camera until the desire to film him had been thoroughly analyzed. Since during the work of analysis one thing always relates to another, Lehrman continued to film Freuds colleagues while he did his analysis and awaited Freuds consent to be filmed. The mere acting out of a compulsion did not conform to Freuds conception of a cure. In the film Lehrman several times jokingly states that he was expected to behave according to the principle of Versagung. In mentioning frustration, Lehrman alludes to the meaning that Freud gives to symptom formation during the analysis. Freud (1919, 16264) observed that in the course of their treatment patients find substitutes

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for their symptoms by giving a great deal of attention to everyday actions, thus diverting the cure from its path. The analyst must take energetic action against the obstruction that this premature substitute formation can represent. Obsessive filming during the analysis would have been considered one of these substitute symptoms. Freuds appearance on the screen serves as a seal of success in having found the wish underlying the symptomatic action of filming and thereby reached the end of the frustration: Finally, when the Professor especially thought that we have enough extracted out from this experience, he did permit me to take some pictures of him, comments Lehrman on this breakthrough. The question of what knowledge it may have been that illuminated his compulsion is left open. It is also impossible to ascertain if Freud was satisfied with the result of Lehrmans obsession, but he was satisfied with the result of the analysis.17 The last images, which show Brill and other American analysts in the 1940s, many years after Lehrmans analysis, reassure the viewer that although a clarification was found for the compulsion to film, Lehrman nonetheless continued to find enjoyment in his avocation. The whole film thus takes on the quality of an overdetermined symptomatic act, whose dramaturgic staging derives from a threefold self-referentiality. As a viewer, one is confronted with a Doppelgnger that cuts the illusory floor from under ones feet, while the director appears both as a commentator who is doubled by a second voice and as an analysand, from whose perspective the film seems to be a relatively unimportant byproduct. The observer must give up all hope of uncovering the causes of the compulsion to film. It was precisely the reflexive implementation of the medium that caused the first psychoanalytic film theories to retreat into new formulations. Ironically, this is the background from which Lehrmans film programmatically distinguishes itself. At the center of the first psychoanalytic speculations stood either the beguilement of the viewer in the face of cinematic representation or the ensuing regression that overcomes the viewer in the darkened movie theater. Motion pictures were held to elicit enjoyment because they skillfully exposed the viewer to a consciously accepted act of illusory deception. However, the suspension of disbelief can only be

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systematically applied to films that demand such a pact from the viewer. Thus the principles by which cinema yields pleasure were primarily developed to account for feature-film genres, while documentaries for the most part remained outside the scope of psychoanalytic film theory. Accordingly, films that contributed to various forms of disillusionment should not have been able to find an audience because they did not make use of the mechanisms of regression and, according to a rigorous application of the theory, should only have been able to produce displeasure. Hence it remains an open question why a documentary film such as Lehrmans can provide so much enjoyment to its viewers. Sigmund Freud Foundation Berggasse 19 1090 Vienna Austria l.marinelli@freud-museum.at Translated by Christopher Barber Notes
1. 2. 3. Stekels 1926 text, On the History of the Analytic Movement, includes his 1903 piece in the Prager Tageblatt. Recent discussions of psychoanalytic literature on the feature film can be found in Marcus (2001) and Bergstrom (1999). On the figure of the psychoanalyst in feature films, see Gabbard and Gabbard (1987). All quotations from Freuds letters to Lehrman are taken from manuscripts in the Freud Collection, Library of Congress, Washington. There are sixteen letters from Freud to Lehrman, written originally in English, in which, however, the film is never mentioned. In an interview with the New York Times, Lynne Lehrman Weiner reported on the Freud Archives denial of access to the film: Dad and I had done a 20minute version. I later learned they were supposed to be locked until 2057. I called Dr. Kurt Eissler, the former director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, and said: You know what will happen in 2057. You are going to find nothing but dust in that vault. The films will be dust (Green 2000, 3). Following her intervention, the copy was released in the late 1980s. According to Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud believed that the problem would solve itself since the film was destined to be forgotten due to its artistic heavyhandedness (1988, 358). One may doubt whether this attempt to end a scientific-political conflict with an aesthetic judgement has proven successful. This statement is based on a personal communication from Lynne Lehrman Weiner. Copies of the film are currently kept in the Lehrman Weiner Archive (New York), the Freud Collection of the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), the Freud Museum (London), and the Sigmund Freud Museum (Vienna).

4.

5.

6. 7.

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8. 9. 10.

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11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

Because the film is not available through official lending institutions and copies are held by only a few archives, I shall describe its content. In addition to the Vienna Opera, several other buildings and monuments also led to confusion, but Lehrman Weiner, perceiving her fathers version as a historical document, decided against making corrections. Among the earliest moviegoers was Otto Rank, who in his study The Double (1914) discusses the connection between dreams and cinematic technique with reference to the example of films by Hans Heinz Ewers. Rank, whose conceptions had by 1929 become far removed from Freuds, naturally does not appear in Lehrmans film. Otto Fenichel, who also can be counted among these moviegoers, cites the report of this episode from the newsletter of the Chicago Institute in his circular letter of November 30, 1936: Unfortunately, Dr. Alexander refuses to reveal more details (Mhlleitner and Reichmayr 1998, 509). For todays viewer, who is used to rapid cuts, this scene does not seem to be nearly as short as Sachs describes it. Rather than limiting the validity of his theory, this attests to what degree cinematic technique and audience expectations have changed since the 1920s. For more biographical details on Borel, see Roudinesco (1986, 35860), Surya (1992), and Leiris (1992). Discussion has primarily focused on the effects of these efforts on institutional politics. See Eppensteiner, Fallend, and Reichmayr (1987); Ries (1995; 2000). A rather unsystematic cross-section of the psychoanalytic reception of film, starting with Pabst, is offered by Lacoste (1990). Bernfeld wrote two scripts, both dated 1925. The shorter one, Three Worlds in One RoomChildhood Variations on an Adult Theme: The Idea of a Film with Psychoanalytic Perspectives, develops a scenario that remains a sketch, and has been published by Fallend and Reichmayr (1992, 15356). Bernfelds second, much more developed outline for a script, to which I here make reference, Outline for the Cinematic Depiction of Freudian Psychoanalysis in the Framework of a Full-length Feature Film, was published by Eppensteiner and Sierek (2000, 3798). In an unpublished letter, Freud wrote to Brill on July 11, 1928: Maybe I would not have taken him if you had informed me sooner (Freud Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Lehrman succeeded in diminishing Freuds prejudices against Americans, as evidenced by a January 1, 1929 letter to Brill: Lehrman has turned out to be a pleasant surprise for me. Even after your reports, I hadnt expected very much from him, but I find that he is of a better substance than most of the Americans I have met (Freud Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.).

References
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Fallend, Karl, and Johannes Reichmayr, eds. 1992. Siegfried Bernfeld oder die Grenzen der Psychoanalyse. Materialien zu Leben und Werk [Siegfried Bernfeld, or the Borders of Psychoanalysis: Materials on His Life and Work]. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld/ Nexus. Fenichel, Otto. 1998. 119 Rundbriefe [119 Circular Letters]. Vol. 1. Ed. Elke Mhlleitner and Johannes Reichmayr. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld. Freud, Sigmund. 1901. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. S.E., vol. 6. . 19121913. Totem and Taboo. S.E., 13:1161. . 1919. Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy. S.E., 17:15968. Gabbard, Krin, and Glen O. Gabbard. 1987. Psychiatry and the Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Green, Donna. 2000. Films Honor a Writers Father, and Freud. The New York Times, January 2, Section 14WC, p. 3. Kemner, Gerhard, and Gelia Eisert, eds. 2000. Lebende Bilder: Eine Technikgeschichte des Films [Living Pictures: A Technical History of Film]. Berlin: Nicolai. Lacoste, Patrick. 1990. Ltrange cas du Professeur M. Psychanalyse lcran [The Strange Case of Professor M.: Psychoanalysis on Screen]. Paris: Gallimard. Leiris, Michel. 1992. Journal19221989 [Diary19221989]. Ed. Jean Jamin. Paris: Gallimard. Marcus, Laura. 2001. Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness. Psychoanalysis and History, 1:5168. Metz, Christian. 1977. Le signifiant imaginaire: psychanalyse et cinma [The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema]. Paris: Union Gnerale dditions. Rank, Otto. 1914. Der Doppelgnger [The Double]. Imago: A Journal for the Application of Psychoanalysis to the Human Sciences, 3:97164. Ries, Paul. 1995. Popularise and/or Be Damned: Psychoanalysis and Film at the Crossroads in 1925. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76:75991. . 2000. Film und Psychoanalyse in Berlin und Wien 1925 [Film and Psychoanalysis in Berlin and Vienna, 1925]. In Eppensteiner and Sierek 2000, pp. 17197. Roudinesco, Elisabeth. 1986. Histoire de la psychanalyse en France [The History of Psychoanalysis in France]. Vol. 1. Paris: Seuil. Sachs, Hanns. 1929. Zur Psychologie des Films [On the Psychology of Film. Die Psychoanalytische Bewegung [The Psychoanalytic Movement], 1:12226. Stekel, Wilhelm. 1926. Zur Geschichte der analytischen Bewegung [On the History of the Analytic Movement]. Fortschritte der Sexualwissenschaft und Psychoanalyse [Advances in Sexology and Psychoanalysis], 2:53975. Surya, Michel. 1992. Georges Batailles: La mort luvre [George Bataille: Death to the Work]. Paris: Gallimard. Vernet, Marc. 1980. Clignotements du noir-et-blanc [Flickerings in Black and White]. In Thorie du film [Theory of Film]. Ed. J. Aumont and J. Leutrat. Paris: Albatros, pp. 22233. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. 1988. Anna Freud: A Biography. New York: Summit Books.