Freud
Sigmund Freud needs little introduction to the educated public. His founding of psychoanalysis and the concomitant development of psychotherapy, paved the way in the 20th Century to a deeper understanding of how our minds work (or don’t), how our thoughts can effect our bodies, and how early conditioning plays into our present lives, relationships, and psyches. But he was a man of his time, which allowed his misinterpretations of women’s sexuality and his downplaying their reports of sexual molestation and incest. Yet his brilliance as a thinker, writer, and ground-breaking iconoclast, which resulted in a vast dismissal of his theories, which led him in some Viennese circles to be shunned and disgraced, shines through in this TV series.
From 1984, this six-part mini-series explores in dramatic fashion the early years of Freud’s extraordinary theories of human psychological behavior up to the weeks just before his death in 1939, in fortunate exile from Nazi Germany.
This was the vehicle that brought David Suchet (the best Hercule Poirot ever) to fame and fortune. Consistently good in his work, he makes a glorious marriage to the at-first belittled and finally lauded Doctor Freud.
Because it was video-taped 26 years ago, the normal fashion in keeping television costs down at that time, it takes a bit of getting used to, with the outdoors flattened and the colors muted. But, aside from that cavil, it’s bang-up good, taking the controversies of the day and laying them out dramatically. Writer Carey Harrison explains the theories and ties them to Freud’s own life, including his assumption that bi-sexuality is a norm in human beings and that most grown-up neuroses are caused by early sexual abuse and confusion. Some of his theories, naturally, have since been criticized as over-reaching, but the script admirably keeps him in focus for us.
Suchet, of course, turns in an extraordinary performance, matched by Michael Kitchen (FOYLE’S WAR) as a fellow searcher into the psyche, Ernst Von Fleischel-Marxow. Both are excellent, along with Anton Lesser as Wilhelm Fleiss, Alison Kay as Freud’s loving daughter, Anna, Suzanne Bertish as his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, for whom he has an unrequited love, and Eliza Hunt as his not-always-understanding wife. Moira Armstrong directed with a sure hand. (Now, aged 80, she also helmed many of the episodes of the superlative LARK RISE TO CANDLEFORD (2009-2010).
This overview of Dr. Sigmund Freud is very much worth the effort to see or own.