Georg Wilhelm Pabst Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ira Konigsberg

Critical Essay by Ira Konigsberg

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...
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