Bound in Freud's Spell

Even more fascinating than Freud’s theories, in my opinion, are their cultural reception, and the process of their eventual integration into popular culture. We brought up in class how, at the time when Freud was publishing his work, it met a lot of resistance due to its sexual implications. His works argued that an implicit but unconscious sexuality was embedded in all family dynamics, especially in children (who were originally believed to embody innocence). After his death in 1939, Freud’s ideas began permeating society and popular discourse, but one has to wonder… how did such radical theories become so widely accepted? In 1945, Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Spellbound became the first big Hollywood movie to popularize Freud’s ideas, and I think analyzing the film’s depiction of psychoanalysis may provide a glimpse.

The makers of this film were essentially selling psychoanalysis and dream interpretation to the American audience, and were faced with a number of challenges in the promulgation of these ideas. After all, the Hays Production Code was in place at this time, and it included some very restrictive rules regarding sexual content in film; and as we know, Freud’s ideas were often explicitly sexual. The movie does manage to skirt around this issue quite adeptly, with a few double-meaning jokes children wouldn’t likely understand, and a replacement of female sexual desire with Constance’s desire for Hollywood-style romance.

Perhaps more interesting than the issue of sexuality, however, is the film’s dealings with the unconscious. Spellbound was being marketed to Americans who had a strong cultural sense of individualism and autonomy. Such an audience would not be keen to hear that they are forever driven by an unknowable portion of their mind. Freud’s idea of the “unconscious” represented a part of the self which people could never fully access, but which would forever dictate their actions, and the filmmakers needed to address this concept delicately.

And so “Spellbound” never refers to the “unconscious”, which was the term actually used by Freud, but rather to the “subconscious”. The prefix of “sub” infers something subterraneous or buried, which need only be unearthed to be illuminated; the prefix “un” implies, just as Freud intended, something unknowable, which will always remain a mystery.

The distinction is played out in the film quite nicely. A psychoanalyst named Constance Peterson uncovers her originally repressed desire for intimacy when she begins treat a patient called John Ballantine. Ballantine is accused of killing a doctor, and he accepts the blame because of his childhood guilt complex; Constance helps Ballantine uncover a repressed memory of his brother’s accidental death, as well as memories of the doctor being murdered by someone else, finally proving his innocence. At the end of the film, Ballantine is presented as fully “cured”, because the secrets of his subconscious have been fully illuminated. This, of course, is never the case with Freud’s unconscious, which exhibits some symptoms that can be interpreted, but will never be fully understood.

However, the American populace seemed to eat up “Spellbound”s idea of the subconscious; it may hold secret traumas or desires, but they need only be illuminated for the patient to be fully treated and “cured”. A slew of other psychoanalytic films began cropping up after “Spellbound”, and the term “subconscious” maintained its popularity. Concepts of psychoanalysis are now embedded in many aspects of pop culture and academia, although sometimes it seems that Freud’s original meanings have been distorted or cherry picked. I suppose it’s not too surprising. A lot of his ideas were fairly unnerving and/or disturbing, thus have required some level of filtration and delicate presentation to penetrate popular culture.