KARL SIEREK

OUTLOOK AND INSIGHT

On Siegfried Bernfeld's Mental Cinema

Should psychoanalysis and cinema be subsumed under one concept, the most appropriate would probably be that of a cultural technique of movement. Both involve an innovation that is indeed outstanding for the 20th century: they have liberated both images of the world and the one who sees them from static, and they have done so under technical, even apparative preconditions and terms. One sets the objects of vision in motion, the other makes it possible to grasp the dynamics of the subject. What was frequently described as the mobilization of the gaze in the second half of the 19th century is supplemented in the early 20th century by the recognition of the unfathomable movement of human subjectivity.

Today there is hardly anyone who would seriously doubt this concurrence. Yet that has not always been the case. In the twenties it was hardly usual to locate both cultural techniques in the reference network of temporality and dynamics. A script written in 1925 by the psychoanalyst Siegfried Bernfeld had the honor of being the first to present the destiny of psychoanalysis and cinema with this clarity and consistency as well as artistic and scientific precision. The Draft with the programmatic title On a Filmic Representation of Freudian
Psychoanalysis in the Framework of a Feature Film can thus be regarded as a unique piece of cultural history. The script can be read as an imagined film. Bernfeld’s text, written with admirable visual force, nevertheless remains what it is: a script. And as such, it is—as anyone concerned with the matter would concede—only rarely pure reading pleasure. For this reason, Mental Cinema is intended to accompany the Bernfeldian script as a reading aid, somewhat like the synchronous soundtrack of a film. In commenting, it seeks to make the images dance and make the imagined film visible using words, thus illustrating the turbulent dynamics which arose from the encounter between the two, only just matured, cultural techniques. The imagined film intends, first of all, to enlighten and educate. Its author regards himself primarily as a teacher illustratively communicating psychoanalytic theory to the people. Adhering to the popular education tradition of “Red Vienna,” Bernfeld was an enthusiastic and enthusing educator. He not only wrote for specialist journals, but also took part in discussions on questions of psychoanalysis, education and school reform via the daily press. His writing also dealt with Zionism, socialism, censorship, sex education, popular culture and, not least of all, film. In the Neue Freie Presse, for instance, he discussed the script for the planned film adaptation of Artsybashev’s novel Sanin (1925) by Friedrich Feher, who had set himself the difficult task of setting a novel, “which exhausts itself in psychosexual problems” (1) in filmable images. The passionate toy collector advocated that children should be allowed to ruin their things (2) and was actively opposed to trash and smear campaigns. Like Otto Neurath, the inventor of the “Viennese Method of Pictorial Statistics,” with whom he continued to correspond when both had emigrated, he was concerned with the question of the pictorial nature of abstract scientific and theoretical insights. For this reason, his draft can also be read as a kind of “poor man’s guide to the interpretation of dreams,” a pictoris mundi of Freudian theory, and is thus, to this extent, comparable with Neurath’s invention, although the latter was far more successful.

In this way, cinema is not merely instrumentalized as a means of transport, as a medium in social conflict, but is instead made the object of social discourse with its aesthetic power of expression and its technical function. And it describes the—possibly impassable— path from the abstract conceptual to the visual concrete: from the speakable to the visible. Bernfeld’s Draft thus shows the level of sophistication that psychoanalytically trained thinking is able to achieve in the construction of narratives in word, picture and sound. With his text, in fact, he succeeds in treating several of the concepts of the subjectivity of the person seeing the film. The moving spiral form of the narrative structure, which condenses in the dynamic and permeable layering of the Kiesler “space stage,” prevents the encroachment of a rigid relationship between the two cultural techniques and the deterioration of the one— namely the psychical apparatus—into a metaphor of the other—the cinema. It poses a barrier against the—admittedly given—seductiveness of taking a mutual metaphorization of the two apparatuses literally. Instead, the constantly moving space stage demands to be taken not literally, but pictorially. Bernfeld does not present a “model” of the psyche, he does not substantiate the psychical apparatus in the sense of a misunderstood concept of the topic. Instead, the script offers an ongoing picture of the concept of communication that Jacques Lacan proposes in a criticism of one of Bernfeld’s later concepts. Although Bernfeld is a “qualified analyst,” according to Lacan, in his essay The Principle of Entropy and the Death Instinct (cowritten with the engineer and medical student Sergei Feitelberg), he demonstrates “what taking a theoretical metaphor literally leads to.” (3) Lacan, who considers Bernfeld one of “the best analysts,” thus alludes to the crucial question that the script already perpetually revolves around: if and how it could be possible to mould abstractions into images and concepts. The arrangement of the text as the transformation of a script with an accompanying synchronous soundtrack on the white wall of the Secession is thus more than the representation of an imagined film. It is intended to contribute to embedding the debate on psychoanalysis and cinema in its historical context, and to offer suggestions, from the perspectives of history and of theory, for how to deal with a film text that has been written, but not (yet) transformed into picture and sound. As an initial contribution (and certainly no more than that) to the discussion of a methodological proposal for script analysis with the concomitant theoretical questions, this transfer could help to shift film pre-production in the form of scripts more into the focus of contemporary film work.

1 Neue Freie Presse, 2 May 1924.

2 Siegfried Bernfeld, Zerbrochenes Spielzeug – ganze Menschen! Das Spielzeug als Blitzableiter böser Triebe, in: UHU. Das neue Ullstein-Magazin, 3rd edition, volume 3, 1926/27, pp. 26–34.

3 Jacques Lacan: Seminar Buch II. p. 149.