I sogni cinematografici di Jean-Paul Sartre

Abstract

During the making of Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940), John Huston and Wolfgang Reinhardt decided to realize a movie about Freud. Huston suggested the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to wrote the screenplay. The idea was to discuss a fundamental period in the history of the Freudian theory of the unconscious mind: 1885-1890, the years of the self-analysis, the work with doctor Breuer, Charcot and the hypnosis, the discovery of the importance of dreams for the diagnosis of neurosis. The first screenplay written by Sartre (1958) shows a very deep knowledge of Freudian thought. I conjecture that two books issued at the time (The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud by Ernest Jones and The Birth of Psychoanalysis, containing the correspondence between Freud and his friend Wilhelm Fliess) may have influenced the description of Freud created by the writer. Sartre discovers the contradictory personality of a man, always in conflict with himself. The quarrel with Huston led Sartre to ask for his name to be removed from the credits. According to the director, the final version of the movie is too long, but nonetheless the changes destroyed Sartre’s work. Hysteria, a subject in which Sartre had always been interested, and dreams were his main objects of interest. The goal of this article is to study the oneiric scenes of Sartre’s screenplay. I would like to analyze the philosopher’s conception of dream as a “belief” and to show how the same scenes have changed in the final version of the movie as well as explore the relationship between oneiric writing and its representation in a movie. The movie Freud: the Secret Passion is a unique piece of work. Its oneiric scenes are among the most interesting ever seen on screen. All of this because of a challenge set by Huston: direct a movie about Freud written by an anti-Freudian philosopher.