How many screenwriters did Freud help over the years

In this year's high-scoring drama "The Long Season", Gong Biao often mentioned Freud and his masterpiece "The Analysis of Dreams" to highlight his identity as a college student in the 90s. Psychoanalysis, as a modern intellectual term, appears in his dialogue with Liru; "The Analysis of Dreams" is a real prop that can be hung on the chest for self-defense, or appear on the bed of the bachelor dormitory at a critical moment.

"The Long Season"

In the third part of "Ma Dashuai", which is a tribute to this drama, it also appears in psychoanalysis. Fan Debiao, who was in the kitchen and had his heart set out to the starry sky, offered this "dream interpretation master" from afar to the throne. He thinks he shares the Austrian scholar's interests, and on a practical level, the latter can show himself a clear way to start a business – helping people interpret their dreams.

"Ma Dashuai 3"

In the above two episodes, psychoanalysis plays a somewhat symbolic role by virtue of its modern intellectual attributes and similarity to traditional Chinese metaphysics. But throughout film history, psychoanalysis has played more than that. Hubert Damisch, the most important contemporary French thinker and art historian, wrote in his classic book "The Gap: Withstanding the Test of Photography", how does psychoanalysis get "expressed" in film, and what is its function?

The following is an excerpt from "Urgency: A Research Proposal" in The Gap – Withstanding the Test of Photography.

For film, there are other "excessive" forms (in addition to "acceleration"). The first is the use of psychoanalysis, sometimes parody, sometimes not. It uses psychoanalytic tricks, psychoanalytic techniques, and sometimes the opposite, without worrying about whether there must be a context for treating patients.

How does psychoanalysis get "expressed" in film, how does it intervene in film, how can it be brought to the screen, presented, or shown its role? What role does it play there? What functions does it have to accomplish, and what are the nature of these functions? All these questions do not involve the image of psychoanalysis on the screen, but the content and results of such a practice of bringing it to the screen, presenting it or showing its function. In a dashing, casual way, and sometimes in the form of comics, the film borrows from psychoanalysis some devices and devices, and especially means applicable to its own ends, so that a secret tacit understanding emerges between the two, manifested in various ways - which has not been explored in theory - and not only at the level of the script, but also continues the entire shooting process until the final editing.

Movies can use psychoanalysis to reveal the motives of some characters, and even explain the way some of them behave; However, psychoanalysis can also transcend psychological mechanisms and become one of the dynamics, or even the main motivator, of a plot structured in whole or in part with therapy. In this case, the problem is not the psychoanalytic references and references used in film, but the place that cinema (in whatever form) can provide to the unconscious and in the process of constituting its own "scene," which is the scene of the film (here using the concept of the word "scene" in the "writing scene" that Derrida refers to in Freud's relationship with writing).

Movies certainly have a certain limit to the duration of time, and the time required to act—even the place of action—is also limited to a certain time limit when the action takes the form of therapy, and the psychoanalytic process actually has no definite deadline. Psychoanalysis has its rhythm, its own rhythm, a rhythm of work that does not correspond to the operation of the film, and is completely different from the tricks used in the operation of the film. To demonstrate the contribution of psychoanalysis to the seemingly paradoxical nature of the film's acceleration process, I will give only two examples taken from Hollywood films, which are particularly special from the perspective of Freudian psychoanalysis.

If Robert Theodmark's The Serpent's Den or Alfred Hitchcock's Doctor Edward, unlike many of the films we can see today, are not so much like video games, then the tension of time, that is, what Lacan called "urgent function," is manifested in it in the form of another logic, another need, another structure that belongs not only to the psyche. In both films, the plot requires that the duration of treatment be drastically shortened.

For example, in "The Snake's Den", for the dual purpose of treatment and benefit, because traditional psychoanalytic institutions cannot accept the slow process of psychoanalysis, and the effect has not been immediate compared to electroshock therapy (the film is a wonderful depiction of the situation in psychiatric hospitals after World War II): therefore, the doctor was ordered to end the treatment of a female patient as soon as possible, dedicated to freeing her from the terrible process of electroshock therapy, and as a result, the period that the doctor had became only one week.

"Snake's Den"

In "Doctor Edward", the couple played by Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman have only two to three days to prove their husband's innocence, because he is a victim of hallucination, making him a suspect in a murder case: in this context, they go to Bergman's teacher and put the patient on an accelerated treatment, which from the point of view of effectiveness, plays a challenging role and becomes a suspenseful motivator. In both films, the unconscious manifests itself through a form of resistance, at least temporary, to the rhythm that people want to force it to accept, in order to act as the "god of the outside world" who solves everything at the end.

The idea of speeding up the normal process of conscious recall (not counting the effect of editing) to satisfy an objective requirement external to psychoanalytic mechanisms bears similarities with heretical thoughts and behaviors that have repeatedly emerged throughout the history of psychoanalysis: even the problem of sudden short-circuits as unconscious facts in the undiminishable time flow of the continuous work of analytic therapy constitutes a real narrative dynamic, especially in Dr. Edward, which deals with the question of life and death in which a person's life is at stake. Psychoanalysis provided a means for cinema, which Hitchcock later reused in The Thief, though not with the same strong tension.

François Truffaut once told Hitchcock that he did not like the plot in "Dr. Edward". Hitchcock replied that it was just another story of a man's hunt, but the situation made it "pseudopsychoanalytic." That makes it difficult for us to play a role here. But, in fact, this statement does not match Hitchcock's intentions when he returned to Hollywood in 1944 (Truffaut deliberately did not mention it to Hitchcock): when he said that he wanted to make "the first film about psychoanalysis", choosing Ben A. Hircht was fortunate to be a collaborator in the writing of the play, as he was interested in psychoanalysis. It would be very surprising if Hitchcock did not put his own thoughts in this script. Because this plot must find a truth, which is external to the goal that psychoanalysis demands, it uses a therapeutic mode and an acceleration mechanism from the opposite side.

"Dr. Edward"

If there is a reverse understanding of treatment, then it is intentional, and the following facts can be proved from the opposite side: on the one hand, perfectly composed plots are evocative (such as the dream snow scene conceived by Salvador Dalí) and there is no time for silence; Hitchcock himself, on the other hand, like a very good psychoanalyst, calmly let the protagonist wander through the countryside, slowly, and finally pretended to drive the unconscious to a state where there was nowhere to hide (such as the scene where the hero and heroine go for a walk in the wild shortly after their first meeting, all in order to say the word "liver mud sausage" through Bergman's sexy, open mouth).

Beyond "familism" (Oedipus complex), the scenes that the film opens up for psychoanalysis are very closely related to gender differences from a narrative point of view. In "Snake's Den", the doctors are all men, the patients and nurses are women, and the film ends with the female patient returning to her man, and the doctor believes that the proof has completed a successful psychological transfer ("Look, you don't love me anymore!"). Throughout the film, there is always a picture of Freud pinned to the wall with a thumbtack, like a key to the plot, and at the same time like a witness.

In Dr. Edward, the analytical-therapeutic relationship between the psychoanalyst and his temporary patient is done through a woman, herself a psychoanalyst, who speaks only so that the unconscious can also speak, because in the unconscious, the truth in the hallucination is sealed. The important thing is that in both films, there is a three-way relationship, and no matter how different the characters, it is one woman and two men, except that in the former film, the patient is a woman, and in the latter, the man is a patient. This can be replayed.

So, what is the situation of gender differences in the face of time and space, time flow and place in traditional films? It is as if time and space are men's business, and place and process are women's problems: men master the space of various institutions or the space for travel between planets, but also the space for psychoanalysis; Women are placed in locations such as nursing homes or in office structures. The result of such a division of roles is a difference in the use of language, mastery and right to speak. The mechanics in 2001: A Space Odyssey meant that while women could get a seat on the board, they couldn't speak in it and had no place for them in spaceships. In this context, even the voice of the computer "Hal" can only be male: imagining it as female changes the situation, and even changes the structure of the entire film.

We should compare the footage after the hero and heroine kiss in "Dr. Edward" with the footage after the astronauts arrive at Jupiter in "2001: A Space Odyssey". Appearance aside, which of these two images also represents "entering" is not figurative? Are the doors on an axis opening one after another, or the opening up of space that the shots seem to be trapped in, but also using a dizzying acceleration that contrasts with the rhythm that preceded the film?

"Dr. Edward", "2001: A Space Odyssey"

The latter is a metaphor for the transition to the other side of time and space, and finally enters a tomb of no apparent age from the decoration, on a modern style fence, hanging some copies of Rococo furniture and paintings, in this tomb life seems to be continuing, beyond death (expressed by astronauts taking off their spacesuits and no longer using breathing aids), embodied in various plants, and in a kind of absolute loneliness. However, the object of the whole film or the whole story appears, as Gérard Vaikmann called the "object of the century": an object that is completely minimalist abstraction, because of this rectangular stone tablet (where did it come from, what metal is it made of?). It appears only at the end of the trip, inserted into the ground, without any other features symbolized by the genitals, only its verticality.

In "2001: A Space Odyssey", it is said that the computer that can never go wrong is its "masters" who designed the program to manage and control the operation of the spacecraft and the entire space voyage in any detail, but it seems that something went wrong. This mistake looks like a psychoanalytic slip of the tongue.

Later, when the plot developed to a certain extent, there was a very wonderful scene: the astronaut cut off the function of the computer "Hal" step by step, and the computer told him not to continue, told him its fear, and later described to him under what circumstances it came into the world. Finally, it agrees to sing the children's song taught to it by its owner, and the voice slows down more and more, and finally stops completely (here we can still understand why a female voice cannot appear at this time). As a result, as soon as "Hal" is dismembered and the sound stops (here it has always been a problem of connection, whether the current can circulate or no longer circulate), a message appears on the screen, as if in a silent movie, and finally leaves the astronaut completely out of the network, and shows him that everything is predesigned, including this accident, the betrayal of this story, because it is itself a well-planned result.

"2001: A Space Odyssey"

The betrayal of the story. But at the same time, it is also a betrayal of language, because this last message completely cuts off the language, and all space is closed to the language. Freud, referring to the unconscious, said that it was "timeless", that it had no concept of time, that it was outside of time: sometimes, when translated into French, it was said that the unconscious had no history. However, the unconscious still mixes the various time streams, allowing them to penetrate and confuse each other (the various time streams, here, must use the plural, because there are only special time flows and places).

So, can we say that it is "non-spatial", liberated, liberated, detached from space, just as it is detached from time? However, in order to be able to mix and confuse various references (whether spatial or temporal), the unconscious still needs a certain spatial scope. Since place is equivalent to the relationship between process and time for space, the concept of place is obtained earlier than the concept of space, because space is reduced to something that can only be projected by the "self" and projected on what Freud called the "surface": that is, what film (film is by no means "timeless" or "non-spatial") can be presented, because in this case, the concept of projection is decisive, and the concept of screen and screen is also decisive.

So we are not here to expose the caricature distortions of psychoanalysis that many films (Hollywood or otherwise) make, but to take advantage of this often intentional and extensive exaggeration, what we call "testing" (in the full sense of the word), and the film's use of it in the name of means, to learn more about the unconscious. In the West, cinema is combined with the unconscious, just as in the East, for a certain period of time, cinema is combined with revolution.

In John Houston's Freud, the best film to this day, John Houston's Freud, the script takes a long-story approach (another form of acceleration), focusing the entire narrative on the birth of psychoanalysis, linking it to the study of hysteria (it should be compared to the first script that Sartre wrote, and the film that Papster originally wanted to shoot with Freud and later gave Freud to Carl Abraham). Its decisive moment at a crossroads lies in the transition from the realm of symptoms to the realm of language.

"Freud"

According to Deleuze and Guattali, the resumption of the ability of hysterical women to speak became the beginning of psychoanalysis, just as the wandering of men suffering from schizophrenia became the beginning of schizophrenic analysis. In this case, the relationship based on the gender difference between men and women also exists in three terms, two of which are male and one of which are female: Schacco or Breuer/Female Patient/Freud. The emphasis is on the sudden, sudden effect of discourse in treating hysteria, at least this suddenness is evident in the film: the discourse terminates the physical symptoms and makes them eventually disappear, as if with the effect of a close-up completely superficial, foreshadowing the later disassembly of psychoanalysis in the space of human discourse.