Although poked fun at in modern society, Sigmund Freud is often credited for bringing the use of psycho-analysis to the forefront of psycho-therapeutic practice. Dreams are an obvious place to start in understanding the way someone works, but it could be argued that everything a person says or does (or doesn’t say or doesn’t do) can, with the correct application of psychoanalysis, be used to reveal the truth of that person. In the same way, art is easily dissected and turned on its creator to expose personal desires, weaknesses, or concerns. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 film, Spellbound, is overflowing with psychological signs and symbols that are fun and fairly simple to notice and define. The film itself is about a psycho-analyst helping a man recover his repressed memories in order to exonerate himself from a murder accusation. On top of that, side characters (as well as the audience) are invited to psycho-analyze not only the patient but the doctor and her relationship with him. Less obviously, the set dressings, costumes, cinematography, music, blocking, props, and dialogue are neatly used to disclose more information about the characters and the events of the plot. And finally, the nuances of the story itself go beyond the psyche of the characters and betray the biases and imperfections of the filmmaker(s).
The film opens with an overly simplified elucidation:
“Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane. The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind. Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear… and the evils of unreason are driven from the human soul.”
Constance, the beautiful and unnecessarily emotionless doctor serves as a surrogate for the audience, occasionally explaining some of the more basic minutiae of psycho-analysis. When confronted by a patient suffering from a debilitating guilt complex she attempts to soothe him by explaining, “People often feel guilty over something they never did. It usually goes back to their childhood. The child often wishes that something terrible would happen to someone, and if something does happen to that person, the child believes he has caused it. And he grows up with a guilt complex over a sin that was only a child’s bad dream.” This explanation serves as our first foretaste into the coming plot-line involving JB, an amnesiac who has repressed his horrifying memories and replaced them with a completely fabricated life in which he is guilty of a murder. While JB and his love-struck doctor run from the police, Constance attempts psychoanalysis on him by forcing him to look at black lines on a white surface, or asking him repeatedly about his past and his childhood. She even brings him to a ticket booth and pressures him to try and revert back to a repressed memory in order to buy tickets to the same location. Finally ending up at her old mentor’s home, JB begins to lose it even more. Dr. Alex Brulov and the audience begin to observe his behavior and make assumptions about his mental state. Both overt and covert efforts are initiated by the doctor as he sends them to bed, “Good night and sweet dreams… which we’ll analyze at breakfast.” JB goes crazy in the middle of the night as he’s accosted by numerous black lines on white surfaces and, in his rage, approaches the doctor with a razor and seems just about to kill him. The doctor has foreseen this possibility through his observations of the couple and neutralizes the threat. Constance, who believed they had been successful in their attempts to conceal the truth from Alex, is astounded that he had gathered so much. He tells her, “Women make the best psycho-analysts until they fall in love. After that they make the best patients.” He implies that her behavior was screaming the obvious truth of the situation. He agrees to analyze JB’s dream and through his and Constance’s efforts, JB’s innocence is discovered.
Although his basic reading is almost painfully obvious, the filmmakers incorporate a lot of Freudian aspects into the cinematic elements of the film. The characters, especially JB, are faced with a lot of the uncanny, most often when a black line is seen on a white surface. As JB is reminded of these repressed memories, he feels that familiar yet foreign sensation. In order to convey that to the audience (who has no idea why he seems to care so much about that table cloth), the music is abruptly changed to a jarring and sci-fi-esque motif, introducing the use of the theremin into Hollywood music. The use of light and shadows, so often used well by Hitchcock, are no exception in this film. During JB’s most serious “episode,” his crazy is ignited by the excess of shadows in the bathroom. The shadows he both enters and creates on the stairs add to the sense of horror the audience experiences, representing the dichotomy of Alex’s ignorance and our resistant knowledge of JB’s current psychological state. In true Freudian fashion, he is carrying a razor just at pelvic level. Even the weapon of choice is overtly manly: a man’s shaving blade. The camera’s angle is focused on the placement of the razor to emphasize the phallic symbolism. As the subject, JB feels threatened by Alex’s presence. As a father figure (which Alex himself suggests later on) and as a potential obstacle to his desire for Constance, Alex is a threat to JB’s manhood in an explicitly oedipal way. The razor and the cinematic choices created around this scene reveal conscious efforts on the part of the filmmaker to validate Freud’s obsession with phallic symbolism and fear of castration. Other examples are clear in the text including the music and framing of Constance before and after she has JB in her life, the lighting and dialogue representing the competition between JB and the other doctors for Constance’s attention, and the physical changes (observed by framing, zoom, and blocking) of Dr. Murchison when first replaced, brought back in, and then exposed.
The most interesting use of psycho-analysis in regards to this film, however, is the perhaps accidental signifiers that reveal truths about the filmmaker. Without going into too much history or detail, Hitchcock’s treatment of women in all of his films screams, “mommy issues.” Constance is a useful doctor as long as she’s acting like a man. As soon as she falls in love and succumbs to her feminine tendencies, she is a hindrance. Being wrongfully accused is a theme that appears often in Hitchcock’s work and is frequently explained by an overly harsh punishment inflicted by his father when he was very young. His need for control is evident in the plot as well. Hitchcock and Selznick, the film’s producer, clashed publicly during the production of the film. Selznick’s motivation for the production was to publicize and celebrate the use of psychoanalysis, even bringing in his personal therapist to advise on the film. Hitchcock, feeling trapped under expectations, finds ways in the film to undermine the credibility. Over-simplifying the definition of psychoanalysis at the beginning opens the plot up to a lot of holes. An obvious discrepancy is when JB recalls his memory from childhood and declares that he didn’t actually kill his brother, it was an accident. As alluded to, this moment of self-discovery should have been the cure. He then remembers the doctor skiing over the edge of the cliff. But the memories of a gunman are still, for some undisclosed reason, repressed and cause him to be wrongfully imprisoned until the truth is later revealed. Although not written by Hitchcock, this plot point is a smack in the face to Selznick’s unflinching loyalty to psycho-analysis.
As made clear by these very few examples, the psycho-analysis of a film is easily exercised on numerous levels. Characters, creators, and audiences alike are able to extrapolate psychological explanations and justifications from just about anything. And if you're Freud, the phallic symbols can easily be identified. So thank you, Freud, for making the cinema a far more castration-fearing experience than I ever wanted.
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