Spellbound

[*NERAZZURRI*]

Beste mensen,

Ik moet deze week een presentatie geven over Freud voor m'n studie, en wil als opening een stukje film van Hitchcock laten zien, die bekend stond om z'n Freudiaanse onderlegging (moord en verderf: Thanatos: de doodsdrift, het Oedipuscomplex, enzovoorts). Naar het schijnt is het meest voor de hand liggende voorbeeld Spellbound, maar laat ik die nou net niet gezien hebben.

De opening van Spellbound is (lees ik) een citaat van Freud, en de beginscène een ode aan de Oostenrijkse psychiater, en ook in de film is er een droomscène met Dali als vormgever (Dali is ook flink beïnvloed door Freud, dus dat zou een mooie scène zijn om te laten zien).

Kan iemand die de film heeft (gezien) en een beetje kennis van zaken heeft misschien uitleggen wat de connectie is met Freud in Spellbound en welk citaat er wordt aangehaald? De droomscène zag ik al op Youtube (hopelijk net als de openingsscène, of is dat dezelfde scène??), dus daar kom ik wel uit.

Bij voorbaat dank!

[Fikret]

Al een poosje geleden dat ik hem heb gezien, maar de film behandeld een psychoanalyse van de hoofdpersoon. Centraal staat het zoeken naar het bewustzijn en onbewustzijn waar een bepaalde structuur uit te leiden is, uiteindelijk vormen al de elementen die daaruit voortkomen als puzzelstukjes één psychiatrisch verklaarbaar geheel.

[*NERAZZURRI*]

Dank je. Gok dat ik daarmee wel voldoende info heb en weet ik in ieder geval wat ik laat zien

[Richard B.]

Via Google zijn er nog de nodige artikelen over te vinden: http://www.google.nl/search?source=i...ken&meta=lr%3D

Wat ik uit dit artikel begrijp is dat er in Spellbound vrij direct teruggegrepen wordt op Freud's theorieën over verdrongen herinneringen. Spellbound gaat ook over een hoofdpersoon met geheugenverlies die een geheim in zich meedraagt.

Goeie film trouwens. Misschien wel een van de beste die Hitchcock heeft gemaakt. Zeker een aanrader om eens te bekijken.

[*NERAZZURRI*]

Dat ben ik ook zeker van plan, alleen red het effe niet meer op zulke korte termijn

Bedankt!

[Patrick van den Hul]

Dit artikel combineert 4 film-analyses (waaronder Spellbound) met psychoanalyse en de theorieën van Freud.

Stuk over Spellbound:

Reconstructing Historical Truth: Hitchcock's Spellbound

Alfred Hitchcock's 1945 suspense thriller Spellbound, one of three collaborations between the director and producer [End Page 64] David Selznick, exemplifies several Hollywood traditions in its use of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. As Gabbard and Gabbard (1999, 53-55) have noted, the character of Dr. Peterson (Ingrid Bergman) satisfies at least two conventions. Awakened from a life devoid of emotional intimacy by what appears to be a countertransference-inspired infatuation with a severely disturbed man, John Ballentyne or J.B. (Gregory Peck), who has assumed the false identity of the deceased Dr. Edwardes, her character suggests that women are incapable of simultaneously succeeding as professionals and achieving emotionally fulfilling intimate relationships.3 Dr. Peterson, however, is also an astute psychiatric detective in the best Hollywood tradition, whose clinical skills and dedication ultimately lead not only to the recovery of her patient/lover, but also to the man responsible for the murder of Dr. Edwardes, the aging Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll). Dr. Murchison's narcissistic mortification and murderous rage at the prospect of being succeeded by the younger, more intellectually agile Dr. Edwardes identifies him with two additional Hollywood stereotypes, those of the psychiatrist-as-criminal and the pathological therapist.
Hitchcock never intended for this story to be taken as an accurate depiction of the process of psychoanalysis. In fact, when Dr. May Romm, Selznick's psychoanalyst and the film's psychiatric advisor, voiced objections to its portrayal of analysis, Hitchcock was reported to have said, "But May, it's only a movie." In an interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock also referred somewhat derisively to the film as "just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis" (Truffaut 1967, 165).
Our chief interest, however, is in J.B.'s posttraumatic dream, for which the talents of the surrealist artist Salvador Dali were enlisted. After Dr. Peterson has fled with her patient/lover to the home of her mentor and former analyst, Dr. Brulov (Michael Chekhov), there is a scene in which Brulov explains what he hopes to accomplish with J.B. in what of necessity must be a highly abbreviated psychoanalytic process. In keeping with Freud's formulas, Dr. Brulov's introduction to the patient (which I have quoted as the epigraph to this paper) suggests that the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams, like the therapeutic program of which it is part, is [End Page 65] designed to bring up important mental contents from beneath the repression barrier. Such a model, moreover, reinforces the classical emphasis on the retrieval of veridical truths, whose reconstruction might then lead to insight and therapeutic "cure." As Donald Spence (1982) has suggested, the presumed existence of historical truth is a pervasive ideological principle throughout Freud's writings, and the action of psychoanalysis, which is frequently framed in terms of archeological metaphors, is intended to reconstruct these truths. Such an account, which represents the only possible "correct" or accurate version of the patient's life, is judged capable of explaining not only the distal causes and pathogenesis of a mental disorder, but perhaps also the particular form a patient's pathology has taken.
Interestingly, the dream analysis in Spellbound takes this principle one step further, for here it is not simply significant dynamic themes, conflict-laden fantasies, or powerful emotions of which the dreamer is unaware, but actual circumstances and particular events that may be faithfully represented in the morass of manifest content. However, not even Freud would normally presume to do without the dreamer's associations, though the analysts appear in several scenes to have dispensed with this aspect of the analytic process. Nor would he have advocated an approach that appears to minimize, if not completely discount, the analyst's intuitive discernment in favor of a more detached, positivistic decoding method. The patient's dream in Spellbound has become an intellectual conundrum that can be separated from the analytic process altogether, and whose true meaning is arrived at through deduction.
Spellbound, not unlike Secrets of the Soul two decades earlier, reveals a process of dream interpretation anchored in the one-person psychology of its time. In the classical view, the analyst adheres to a position of presumed neutrality, making observations and formulating interpretations that take little account of his or her own influence on the therapeutic interaction or of the transference-countertransference matrix. Indeed, the classical view of development tended to minimize the influence of the environment generally in favor of the drives.4 In this model, the significance of real objects was understood [End Page 66] chiefly with respect to their availability to help the individual discharge internal tensions, to facilitate or impede gratification. The idea of mutual or reciprocal influence, either in development or with respect to the therapeutic process, received relatively little attention until many years later, and has only recently become a dominant force within psychoanalysis. A related classical assumption is that psychopathology, being an endogenously arising phenomenon, has a relatively stable integrity like that of a physical condition or disease, and is reproducible on demand.
Earlier in the film, unbeknownst to Dr. Peterson, another patient, Mr. Garmes, has wandered into the office of the new Director. Summoned by J.B./Dr. Edwardes, Dr. Peterson immediately goes to his office to retrieve her patient, though not before telling the Director—in the patient's presence—that she was convinced he would find this case interesting inasmuch as "he [Mr. Garmes] fits perfectly into your chapters on the guilt-complex." In addition to being insensitive to the patient, Dr. Peterson's diagnosis reflects a closed-system view consonant with the classical vision of mental disorder. To be sure, the depiction of psychoanalysis in Spellbound as little more than a cathartic cure is distorted and incomplete (Gabbard and Gabbard 1999, 55); nevertheless, there remains a kernel of truth in Hitchcock's entertaining rendition of mid-century psychiatry and the psychoanalytic process.

Voor het hele artikel kun je me mailen

[*NERAZZURRI*]

Bedankt jongens. De presentatie ging prima.

Heb van de film alleen het openingscitaat en de droomsequentie van Dalí laten zien.