YOUNG DR. FREUD {YOUNG DOCTOR FREUD} (TV)
Summary
This documentary focuses on the early years of psychiatric theorist Sigmund Freud. Using archival film footage and photographs, writings of Freud, and reenactments of key events and dreams, the film revisits Freud's early career and his struggle to develop key concepts and techniques of psychoanalysis. The story is punctuated by interviews with experts: biographer Peter Gay, psychoanalyst Martin Bergmann, psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, psychologist Morris Eagle, psychoanalyst Ethel Spector Person, and Freud's granddaughter Sophie Freud. The documentary begins with a seminal event in Freud's life, the death of his father Jacob in 1896. It then returns to his early career as an aspiring scientist at the University of Vienna, a student of Ernst Wilhelm von BrŸcke. Freud fell passionately in love with Martha Bernays, viewers learn, and was encouraged by BrŸcke to become a doctor in order to support the family he wished to have. The film follows Freud through medical studies to an 1885 sojourn in Paris, where he studied with Jean Charcot, a neurologist who treated hysterical patients by means of hypnosis. Back in Vienna, Freud established a practice in neurology and married Martha Bernays, becoming in his private life what the narration calls "a man of regular habits." Nevertheless, he continued to be perplexed by the problem of hysteria, adopting a new mentor, Josef Breuer, with whom he eventually co-authored the book "Studies in Hysteria." Through what Breuer and his famous patient, Anna O., dubbed the "talking cure," Freud worked on the theory that by making a repressed thought conscious a patient freed him- or herself of the symptoms that the repression caused. Eventually, Freud and Breuer parted ways, however, the program explains; Breuer disagreed with Freud's emphasis on sexuality -- specifically early traumatic sexual experience -- as the cause of hysteria. The documentary notes that Freud soon formed a new friendship with physician Wilhelm Fliess, to whom he confided all his ideas. It highlights an unsuccessful speech he made to the Viennese Society for Psychiatry and Neurology, stating his theory about sexuality and hysteria. It then once more discusses the death of Freud's father four months later, when the psychiatrist was forty, showing the ways in which Freud used his own grief and hysteria to analyze himself and then extrapolate from his own symptoms to those of others. Viewers learn that Freud slowly abandoned his early "seduction theory," which postulated that hysteria and neurosis always stemmed from childhood sexual abuse, to argue that these conditions might also stem from childhood sexual fantasies. Although the experts interviewed acknowledge that Freud's jump from his own experience to universality was far from scientific, on the whole they suggest that it was a necessary step to enable Freud to begin theorizing. They comment on his relationship with his mother and take note of the limitations in his view of women's capabilities. The film returns finally to the influence of Freud's father, suggesting that the younger Freud was disappointed in Jacob as a man and as wage earner. It chronicles the difficult genesis of Sigmund Freud's landmark book, "The Interpretation of Dreams," and concludes by touching on his later life and his influence over western thought.
Details
- NETWORK: PBS
- DATE: November 27, 2002 9:00 PM
- RUNNING TIME: 1:50:32
- COLOR/B&W: Color
- CATALOG ID: T:70216
- GENRE: Public affairs/Documentaries
- SUBJECT HEADING: Biography; Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939; Psycholanalysis
- SERIES RUN: PBS - TV, 2002
- COMMERCIALS: N/A
CREDITS
- Ron Devillier … Executive Producer
- Brian Donegan … Executive Producer
- Sarah Colt … Senior Producer
- Greg Diefenbach … Supervising Producer
- David Grubin … Producer, Director, Writer
- Jenny Carchman … Associate Producer
- Jake Boritt … Researcher
- Edda Engelke … Researcher
- Susan Hormuth … Researcher
- Kurt Maier … Researcher
- Florence Tran … Researcher
- Michael Bacon … Music by
- Blair Brown … Narrator
- Liev Schreiber … Cast, Sigmund Freud, Voice
- Michele Pawk … Cast, Martha Freud, Voice
- John Allegra … Cast
- Jake Boritt … Cast
- William Clements … Cast
- Joseph Cvetetic … Cast
- Richard Handy … Cast
- Stanley Love … Cast
- Paul Malec … Cast
- Eben Shapiro … Cast
- Catherine Claire Wedemeyer … Cast
- P.J. Tobia … Cast
- Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim)
- Martin S. Bergmann
- Josef Breuer
- Brucke, Ernst Wilhelm von
- Jean Martin Charcot
- Morris Eagle
- Wilhelm Fliess
- Jacob Freud
- Martha Bernays Freud
- Sigmund Freud
- Sophie Freud
- Peter J. Gay
- Ethel Spector Person
- Elisabeth Young-Bruehl