SOURCE: Friedberg, Anne. “An Unheimlich Maneuver between Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: Secrets of a Soul.” In The Films of G. W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema, edited by Eric Rentschler, pp. 41-51. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Friedberg explores the relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis in light of Pabst's experiences making Secrets of a Soul.

“Mass culture is psychoanalysis in reverse.”

—Leo Löwenthal

The coincident birthdates of psychoanalysis and the cinema have frequently been celebrated as “no accident.” Freud's theory of the unconscious, his “science” of the psyche (die Seele),¹ was, from the start, a theory in search of an apparatus. Yet the cinema, an apparatus which could reproduce and project specular images, was, from its beginnings, an apparatus in search of a theory. Historians who accept metaphors of incipience, birth, parturition, and infancy for the two quite separate “bodies” of psychoanalysis and cinema...