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Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane.
– Opening sequence, Spellbound (1945)
The Freud Museum is proud to present a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 classic Spellbound, followed by a discussion between psychoanalyst Andrea Sabbadini and film scholar Professor Peter Evans.
Spellbound follows the story of a young female psychiatrist, Dr. Constance Peterson (Ingrid Bergman) who protects the identity of the impostor Dr Anthony Edwardes (Gregory Peck), an amnesiac accused of murder while he attempts to recover his memory.
The film famously features a scene known as the “Dream Sequence” designed and produced by the Surrealist artist, Salvador Dalí, in collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock. The screening coincides with the Freud Museum’s current exhibition Freud, Dalí and the Metamorphosis of Narcissus.
Speakers:
Andrea Sabbadini is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and its former Director of Publications. He works in private practice in London, is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at University College London (UCL), a Consultant to the IPA in Culture Committee, the Founder Editor of the journal Psychoanalysis and History, the Director of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival (epff) and a former trustee of the Freud Museum. His books include Boundaries and Bridges: Perspectives on Time and Space in Psychoanalysis (Karnac 2014) and Moving Images: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Film (Routledge 2014).
Peter William Evans is Emeritus Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He has published books on Buñuel, Almodóvar, Carol Reed, Douglas Sirk, Hollywood romantic comedy, the musical, and the Biblical epic. For many years he co-presented with Andrea Sabbadini the Institute of Psychoanalysis film and psychoanalysis sessions at the Riverside and ICA in London.
This event has been supported by The Hidden Persuaders research group whose project examines ‘brainwashing’ in the Cold War for the roles, real and imagined, played by psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. We ask how these disciplines pictured tyranny and freedom of mind, were drawn into ‘psy warfare’ and commerce, and were mobilised in social and political critique.
