Papa of Psychiatry

Freud. It's a fighting word. Two decades after his death, the papa of psychiatry is still assiduously abused as an intellectual Bluebeard who ravaged the soul of modern man in the name of unmitigated sex. Yet he is also hailed as the Columbus of the unconscious who discovered a new world in the depths of the human mind. Which Freud is the real Freud--Bluebeard or Columbus? Director John Huston plumps for Columbus, and he tells why in this taut intellectual thriller.

Hysterics, when Freud (Montgomery Clift) begins to study them, are scorned by neurologists as silly women who act up to get attention, suffer at worst from a "wandering womb." Freud doubts the diagnosis, suggests that hysteria proves the existence of unconscious thoughts. Most of his colleagues laugh in his face, but Dr. Josef Breuer (Larry Parks) describes a hysteric named Cecily (Susannah York) who relieved a symptom simply by talking about what caused it. Freud takes over the case. And so begins a vastly exciting drama of detection, in which the audience simultaneously sees a lurid mystery unfold and a momentous theory develop. Following his patient's lead, Freud successively discovers the therapeutic methods of catharsis, free association and dream analysis, finally derives from a heroic self-analysis his doctrine that most neurosis results from sexual conflict.

The story is not accurate in detail--Cecily, for instance, is a composite patient --but it is resolutely true to the spirit of the man and his work. What's more, it is directed with dominating intelligence. Huston condenses the electric personality of Actress York into an electrocuting charge of neurotic charm. And he even manages to make Actor Clift stop twitching long enough to suggest not ineffectively the Moses of mental health. Behind that bushy beard--who knows?--he may even be acting.

Most Americans have been touched by Freud's great work--some by taking psychiatric treatment, many by observing its effects in others, many more by living in a cultural climate fraught with Freudian ideas. Familiarity may breed some contempt: the film at times seems quaintly elementary. Furthermore, no competent modern psychiatrist accepts the theory that most neuroses take a sexual provenance. Freud, like Columbus, mistook the new world he discovered for something it was not. Nevertheless, it was Freud who saw the way when all the world was blind, and who followed it where all men feared to go. This picture is a tribute much too long delayed.

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