Sigmund Freud Museum in cooperation with the Austrian National Library, Oct 22, 1999 - Feb 6, 2000

Curator
Lydia Marinelli

"The movies really play a role of no small significance for us and this is not the first time I have thought about this fact."
Lou Andreas-Salomé after a visit to the cinema, 1913

Psychoanalysis, as a method of investigating mental processes, offered a new description of the relationship of modern man to himself and as such it rapidly gained acceptance in a popular medium that was as young as it was itself - film. Concerned, like cinema, with people's fantasies, it supplied a basis for new cinematic heroes and treatments. It inspired the use of condensed dream imagery, associative techniques, treacherous parapraxes, oedipal situations and traumatic constellations as cinematic elements. Above all cinematic popular culture transformed the methods and terminology of psychoanalysis into everyday language.

Despite the many coincidences between cinematic and psychoanalytical modes of knowledge in enternainment films, there are only a few documentary films which deal with the psychoanalytical movement and its representatives. The film "Sigmund Freud, His Family and Colleagues, 1928-1947" is one of the rare examples of such a document.

In 1928 Philip R. Lehrman and his family went to Europe for one year. He underwent psychoanalytical training with Freud. As an enthusiastic amateur film maker, he documented his trip with a 16 mm camera and took shots in Berlin, Vienna and Paris. He recorded scenes from Ernst Simmel's sanatorium in Berlin (where Freud was treated in autumn 1928) and the Psychoanalytical Associations of Paris and Vienna. Of course, this "psychoanalytical family" would not be complete without the Freud family that is shown in the film as well. Lehrman, who ironically called filming a treatment of his symptoms and considered it part of his analysis with Freud, started to edit the material in the 50s. His daughter, Lynne Lehrman Weiner, completed the film. Interweaving fragments of the history of the psychoanalytical movement with a private trip, the film sheds light on the "family-like" relationship between psychoanalysis and the cinema.

Philip R. Lehrman, 1895-1958
born in Russia, came to the USA in 1905, where he studied medicine. He opened his psychiatric practice in New York in 1919. In the same year he started to receive psychoanalytical training by Abraham Brill. In 1928 he came to Vienna for one year to undergo analysis with Freud. In addition to introductory works on psychoanalysis, he published studies on child analysis. He died in New York in 1958.

Lynne Lehrman Weiner
worked for different US newspapers and human rights organisations, she lives in New York.

The exhibition presents a documentation on the persons filmed in 1928/1929.