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It is a known fact that Psycho (A. Hitchcock, 1960) is one of the many American films that since c. 1940 have been inspired by the psychoanalytic theory of Freud. At the same time it is a film that has incorporated in its plot structure the details of the so-called psychoanalytic treatment. I shall not go deeper into the reasons for the great interest of the American cinema in psychoanalysis, but it seems obvious to agree with Marc Vernet's suggestion that the psychoanalytic theory and method were very useful with regard to the classical, narrative structure of the Hollywood cinema; a structure that is characterized by a catharsis model by which an enigma has to be solved and the truth has to be discovered,1.
In these series of films the solving of the problem is given to us through a psychoanalytic interpretation. However, the unriddling of the mystery does not always guarantee the patient's recovery. More often it is not the therapeutic treatment as such that has a salutary effect, but the loving attitude of the therapeutist. When Dr. Burlos, in Spellbound (A. Hitchcock, 1945), says to the therapeutist Constance Peterson (played by Ingrid Bergman) that a psychoanalyst in love with the patient is a bad therapeutist (expressing thereby one of the classical laws of psychoanalytic theory), he is of course wrong because every Hollywood film (including Spellbound) will prove the opposite to be true. In spite of this deviation from Freudian orthodoxy, the relation between Hollywood and Freud has proved to be more than a superficial flirtation and has produced a number of interesting films.
Semiotics and psychoanalysis
At the beginning of the seventies, a renewed contact between cinema and psychoanalysis took place, but this time on a theoretical level. One of the most influential works in this field was produced by the French film semiotician Christian Metz, who in 1977 published a volume of four essays: Le signifiant imaginaire. The whole of this volume centers around the question of how the functioning of the cinematic institution can be clarified by the psychoanalytic theory. Metz considered the cinematic institution not only as a film-industrial constellation, but also as a "mental machinery" absorbed by the public. This mental machinery consists of the ideological characteristics of...