Just to clarify a little. I'm pretty sure that Philip French's article
in 'Sight and Sound', Spring 1985, was referring to a period in the
EARLY 1940s when Hitchcock studied Freud for a while. But in any case,
I didn't mean to imply that this was Hitchcock's initial acquaintance
with the gentleman from Vienna. Patrick McGilligan's 'Alfred Hitchcock:
A Life in Darkness and Light' (2003) notes that Hitchcock 'first
browsed' some Freud 'in the 1920s, when Freud cast a shadow over all art
and literature'.
1926 was a key year. Besides Hitch's own THE LODGER (whose protagonist,
or a double, may have killed his blonde sister at her coming-out ball
because he found her emergent sexuality threatened his image of feminine
purity, represented for him by his mother - and then repressed all
memory of what had occurred, thereby anticipating PSYCHO by more than
three decades), the German film SECRETS OF A SOUL (G.W. Pabst) showd
Freud's influence in its story of a man with a knife phobia. Meanwhile,
on the London stage, a melodrama called 'The Lash' dealt with a
forgotten childhood trauma which proves to hold the solution to a
present-day mystery (pre-echoing Hitchcock's MARNIE, you could say).
In Hitchcock's MURDER! (1930) one of the woman jurors expounds
knowledgeably about a fugue state.
I might add that Bill Krohn catalogued Hitchcock's extensive art
collection and not-inconsiderable library, and both showed their former
owner, i.e., Hitchcock, to have been a man who combined specific
interests with broad knowledge, someone of both taste and learning!
- Ken Mogg
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/news-home_c.html
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