Against the background of the always-on sonic leak of the BBC and Hitler’s promise to annihilate the Jewry of Europe, a new film, Freud’s Last Session, hopes to capitalize on a year in which Freud – and psychoanalysis – were resurrected.
The film opens with two pairings – the first, Freud and Freud: Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) teases her dying father, Sigmund (Anthony Hopkins), as he gets up from a nap on his couch. “The doctor lives,” jokes Anna, which, given the film’s title, we know won’t be true for long. Somewhere else in England, Janie Moore (Orla Brady), an older maternal figure, begs CS Lewis (Matthew Goode) to cancel his appointment and stay safely indoors. Both men push through their challenges – the jaw cancer that has made Freud’s life nearly unbearable, and the threat of bombs over Lewis’s train – to gather to debate the facticity of God.
Lewis is late. Fictional Freud, ever the champion of the rules of meeting (hour, fees – what psychoanalysts call “the frame”) is unimpressed. So is his dog, Yofi, the famous chow and first psychoanalytic therapy animal (who, in historical time, not that the film cares, was already two years dead).
Once in Freud’s office, we are treated to an ostensible sparring match; the Great Men debate the existence of God. The only problem: the meeting never happened.
Yes, it is charming to think of a great fantasist meeting with the great theorist of fantasy. But 100 minutes debating the role of fantasy is not what we’re treated to. I’d be ashamed of Freud (and even Lewis) if this were the kind of argument they had. Lewis believes in God and Freud apparently does not (although there is an entire lineage of scholarship that tries to prove his relation to faith was more complicated than that, but no matter). Our protagonists never do much more than restate their initial positions. About halfway through their meeting, Freud once again compulsively clicks on the radio to hear the latest from the BBC. England has gone to war against Germany. Freud says: “So it begins.”
“Again,” rejoins Lewis.
The film arrives in a moment in which a great deal of discursive attention is being paid not just to Freud but the theory of mind he inaugurated. After a decade in which “mental health” – and perhaps trauma especially – has grown as an amorphous public health issue and cultural conversation, many are seeking a response which goes beyond chemical cures and cognitive behavioral therapy, towards the more expansive theory of the mind offered by Freud, and those who followed him. Politically, too, many have sought to reckon with the losses of the left not just materially, but psychosocially.
Much ink has been spilled – including my own – in trying to identify the cause of our Freud mania 2.0. Murmurs that “psychoanalysis has returned” are circulating in the likes of the New Yorker, New York Magazine, the Financial Times and the New York Times. Closer to home, at the Psychosocial Foundation, which I co-direct with the clinician Alex Colston, more than a thousand students annually study the social via psychoanalysis, a tradition inaugurated by Freud; our magazine of psychoanalysis, Parapraxis, grew much faster than we could have predicted (or prepared for).
In my work as a historian of psychology, the wider field has never been more vital, and graduate students come to office hours hoping to figure out how to incorporate the teachings of Freud and his followers into their work – whether as method or historically. Colleagues at other universities happily report full lectures on the history of psychoanalysis, waiting lists and deep excitement on their campuses.
But between the period that Freud’s Last Session represents and its release this December, Freud’s fortunes have gone up and down, cyclically, over and over again.
He is currently emerging from a few decades of denigration, given one slide at most (and only to be called a quack) in introductory psychology classes, reduced to prurient and possibly antisemitic stereotypes in the culture, his ideas brushed aside for their “lack of evidence”.
The idiom of psychoanalysis remains a conventional, shorthand way to discuss romance and parent-child relationship (“daddy’s girl”, “dating their mother”, and so on). It describes the way we think about categories of working relationships proximate and distant (“transference”) and admiring one-sided relationships with intimate strangers (“parasocial” – that most important term from the early pandemic and our age of remote relations). The power of psychoanalysis remains. As Harold Bloom, whom I would not champion otherwise, bluntly put it: “Throwing Freud out will not get rid of him, because he is inside us. His mythology of the mind has survived his supposed science, and his metaphors are impossible to evade.”
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This is not the first Christmas that has brought murmurs of a Freud revival. The late essayist David Rakoff even played Freud in the holiday window of Barneys department store on Madison Avenue in New York and “treated” shoppers on his couch all the way back in 1996. Freud himself, as a boy, was surrounded by Christmas annually in Catholic Bavaria, and even frequented church. Films about Freud, too, have circulated for almost 100 years. Despite Freud’s love of home movies (and he appeared in many) he distrusted the professional medium. Hollywood tried to get Freud to consult on film in the 1920s; he declined (and urged his followers to do so as well). The psychoanalytic Hollywood of the 1940s and beyond helped stimulate the first Freud mania in the US and internationally, with psychoanalysts sitting in on set and actors like Marlon Brando and Cary Grant publicly declaring psychoanalysis as crucial to their life and work. Given all this agita, the first biographical film of Freud, aptly titled Freud, appeared somewhat belatedly in 1962. Starring Montgomery Clift, the film was originally written by Jean-Paul Sartre and would have had a 12-hour run time (as the film was cut down, Sartre removed himself from the project). Zooming ahead to our century, we’ve been treated to both documentary and biopic – from The Century of the Self (2002) to A Dangerous Method (2011). It is more accurate to say Freud is rarely off-screen than to say he has returned to it.
Yet this resurrection of Freud feels different, because more and more people are not just interested in what Papa Freud said, but in trying out his method of treatment themselves. As the novelist Rachel Connolly writes about her own successful time in treatment: “Since I started analysis, I’ve noticed that more and more friends and friends-of-friends seem to be trying it too, like when you learn a new word and suddenly see it everywhere.”
That those not in analysis remain obsessed with what goes on behind the closed doors of the analyst’s office is obvious. The recent golden age of television has provided us with many fictional representations of analytic therapy, from The Sopranos to In Treatment. In parallel, Esther Perel’s couples therapy broadcast, Where Should We Begin?, and Orna Guralnik’s reality TV show for Showtime, Couples Therapy, have let us eavesdrop on the practice and each has gained a cult following. Psychoanalysis – that eminently 20th-century theory of sexuality and desire, of love and aggression – remains our idiom for understanding human relations in the 21st century. We just may not know it. Long past Freud Mania 1.0 of the 1950s and 1960s, we still consume psychoanalysis in its diluted forms, and do so all the time.
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For those newly interested in Freud, it might seem like an excellent time to see the man reanimated for Christmas. Yet Freud’s Last Session is a bad introduction to psychoanalysis, even as Anthony Hopkins is a delightful Freud. It traffics in myths and metaphors rather than Freud’s science, using general facts – say, the advent of the second world war – to wash its counterfactual. Even as I delighted in seeing the facsimile of one of my favorite places in the world – the London home of the Freuds – I was a bit perplexed: what exactly do we get from this set of fakes and counterfactuals now? Are audiences so hungry for Freud that we will accept a false version of him, and perhaps do so unwittingly? Rather than turn to Freud’s own complex history, film-makers optioned a play that is a mental exercise in bringing together two contemporaries who never met (though the film insists a meeting between Lewis and Freud is possible, for Freud met someone working at Oxford three weeks before dying). Nonetheless, Freud did have a great many meetings with other famous great men – let alone his meetings with great women; all of them would have made more compelling movies.
What history is represented is done so most pruriently. Sigmund and Anna’s relationship is given the least charitable, most extreme treatment with none of the context (one scene has Anna nearly masturbating on the couch of her father while in session with him. Yes, they had a deeply complex relationship; yes, she was his patient. No, there is no evidence that happened.). Deploying the language of co-dependent attachment anachronistically, everyone seems to think the father-daughter relationship is ill. It may have been. In the world of the film, Anna is avowedly gay and in love with the last Tiffany heiress. Freud is tacitly accepting so long as the relationship is not anywhere near him (in reality, the elder Freud held more publicly accepting views on gay sexuality than did the younger). Rather than the author of the first edition of the theory of the psyche, Freud comes off like a mad, demanding, quietly homophobic genius who wants all of his daughter.
Even Freud’s jaw cancer is treated like a personality problem. No matter the fact that Freud – both in the film and in history – is about to end his life as the pain becomes unbearable, the emphasis is on why Freud might otherwise want his daughter home with him, or comments delivered sotto voce musing about why Sigmund is closer with his own daughter than his wife (who is never pictured).
The film misses many opportunities to move away from this exaggerated high gossip and to let these two historical actors fight out a war of ideas. Freud’s contributions are routinely minimalized yet taken for granted as fully absorbed in the culture (the Oedipus complex is reduced to a soundbite, a mere quip). Freud is referred to as a “sex doc”, which may be how the director, Matt Brown, and his source material perceived him, and was often how psychoanalysts were maligned rather than celebrated in the press.
More quietly, perhaps, the film lets us think about the limits – and absolute necessity – of psychoanalysis in the face of total annihilation. As war continues unabated in Palestine, even the most cynical of my friends, those who treat my work on psychoanalysis as a bit of an anathema, have shown curiosity about what thinking with the psyche might do to complement and enrich our understanding of politics, whether via Freud himself or his inheritors like the post-colonial analyst Frantz Fanon. How do we understand revenge, annihilation anxiety, the drive to destroy, omnipotent security and its loss, steadfastness, the will to go on being, without it? But even though Freud’s Last Session addresses war, it is mostly as a backdrop, an obstacle for our two characters to get around. Most notably, when CS Lewis has an attack of nerves as sirens sound, raising in him the specter of fighting in the last world war – a moment that might have truly been moving – Sigmund Freud, the great theorist of war neurosis, merely tells him to breathe in and breathe out. Sigmund Freud the mindfulness coach he was not.
Psychoanalysis is, seemingly, not allowed to actually contribute to society within the frame of the film. Then again, in this counterfactual, Freud’s last session was, after all, not an analytic one. Even as Freud has returned to us – both as theorist for considering the pain of this world and for working therapeutically – Freud’s followers must, once again, also contend with a distorted version of the man himself, divorced even from the reality of his own biography in his biopics. For where Freud was, so will the Freud wars be.
The thing we call psychoanalysis is not a punchline, not pure chicanery, and with the return to Freud, we can see it here – and elsewhere – treated like one. Perhaps every generation gets the Freud movie it deserves. The film provides this lesson: no matter how well we think we know Freud – his cigars, his wit – it might actually pay off to consider him as theorist, to read him, to engage with him and all that came after him (including his daughter). Psychoanalysis’s contributions – from the war evacuations architected by Freud’s followers to our best method for treating trauma –are both historical and, thankfully, alive.
