La legitimación del psicoanálisis en la cultura popularel caso de Misterios de un alma (1926) de G. W. Pabst

Resumo

Secrets of the Soul (Geheimnisse einer Seele, G. W. Pabst, 1926) was the first commercial film that used a psychoanalytic case study and therapy as a cinematic narrative. It was completed with the help of Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs, two of the members of Sigmund Freud�s inner circle. This paper studies the role of the film as a means of legitimization of the psychoanalysis into the popular culture in the context of the «psychotherapy for the masses» promoted by the psychoanalytic movement since 1918. With this aim, the paper analyses successively the process that ended up into the cohabitation between two worlds so different as these of psychoanalysis and cinema, the internal polemic of the psychoanalytic movement that surrounded the creative process of the movie, and the way that G. W. Pabst managed to translate into images a talking cure. It is also considered how the principal character, the neurotic professor M., embodied the menaced self, that form of subjectivity distinctive of the happy twenties.