Demons of the Mind. Psychiatry and Cinema in the Long 1960s
Review by Andrea Sabbadini
‘…across the long 1960s, mental health professionals intervened in cinema culture in unprecedented ways, changing how films were conceived, produced, censored, exhibited and received’, in particular by replacing earlier formulaic approaches to psychiatric conditions and enriching established film genres with original case history material.
Most people watching films hope for a rewarding experience, be it entertaining, shocking, educational, thrilling, by following the story and identifying with the vicissitudes of its characters. Those spectators with some knowledge of the film language and of the process of film-making may also be aware of such technical aspects as the use of camera movements, editing style, special effects, as well as understand how films are the complex, and at times conflictual, result of creative interactions among producers, writers, directors, consultants, and others.
Few people, however, are also aware of the extent to which the ‘final product’, before being accepted for general distribution, has gone through an often lengthy and complicated journey of diplomatic negotiations among institutions such as censorship boards and powerful individual stakeholders, with their own political agendas and/or moral principles.
In this respect, the book under review here is a true eye-opener. As its title indicates, it focuses on a specific gender of films produced during a specific historical time: movies dealing with psychiatric issues and made in ‘the long Sixties’, by which the authors mean the twenty or so years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. They list, under different categories, over fifty of them, with Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) as their prototype; this, they say, is the film they have ‘discussed most with mental health professionals, survivors, service-users, film critics, academics and the public for events for the Demons of the Mind project from which this book derives’.
The volume comprises six scholarly essays dealing with different aspects of the ‘behind the scenes’ journeys of a few selected films. The authors have engaged in interviews with filmmakers, consultants and patients portrayed in these movies, researched into little-known archive material, and done extensive reading of their critical reception.
The chapter on psychiatry, Catholics and censorship at the Legion of Decency describes the resistance of the American Catholic church to the notion of psychiatric illness and consequentially of its representation in film, on the grounds that mental conditions were considered the result of moral weakness or demonic possession. However, the Legion of Decency’s reaction to cinematic stories about psychiatry and psychotherapy became less extreme after a speech by Pope Pius XII in 1953 and by the end of the 1960s the Legion stopped interfering with studios producing ‘psy films’.
The Caretakers (released in Britain as Borderlines) and Polanski’s Repulsion are discussed as instances of psychiatric films whose convoluted journeys to the silver screen were influenced by powerful ‘friends’, such as the British Board of Film Censors’ liberalising secretary John Trevelyan and the psychiatric consultant Stephen Black: creative collaborators ‘often shaping the films’ narratives, characterisations, style and form’ who played a crucial role in changing attitudes about censorship and classification.
The chapter on Freud goes to Hollywood recounts how John Huston’s 1962 controversial biopic on the founder of psychoanalysis went through an amazingly labyrinthine series of obstacles and interventions, including two scripts by Sartre (both eventually rejected), advice on script changes by a professor of Psychiatry and Religion, the last-minute addition for English distribution of the mildly erotic subtitle The Secret Passion (that played on popular misconceptions on the place of sexuality in Freud’s theories) and the threat of legal challenges by Freud’s daughter Anna and the late Ernest Jones’s estate.
The chapter on The psychiatric reinvention of the ‘Woman’s Film’ focuses on ‘shifting understandings and representations of gender, domesticity, mental health’ in Nunnally Johnson’s The Three Faces of Eve (1957), the fictionalised version of a real case of multiple personality disorder. The patient in question was for several years in legal contention with 20th Century Fox, and with her former therapists over their diagnosis and treatment of her condition, and over their exploitation of her story in the film.
The BBC television play In Two Minds (1967) by Tony Garnett and Ken Loach, and their big screen reworking of it as Family Life (1971), were inspired by the then fashionable ‘anti-psychiatric’ views of R.D. Laing and of his colleagues David Cooper and Aaron Esterson, on one of whose cases the play is based. The idea of a clear split between anti-psychiatry and conventional psychiatry is challenged by the realisation that Laing and his colleagues were just extending current mainstream trends in British mental health provisions, such as social psychiatry, therapeutic communities and psychodynamic therapies.
The last chapter focuses on films raising forensic psychiatric issues, especially on Richard Brooks’s work. Unhappy with the account of the personalities, psychopathologies and motivation of the two murderers given by Truman Capote in his bestselling book In Cold Blood, Brooks, as a background to his film about that senseless crime, undertook extensive research on relevant police reports, meeting with federal investigators, local prison guards at the Kansas State Penitentiary, as well as with clinicians from the famous Menninger Clinic.
In the final short chapter, Aftershocks, the authors convincingly claim — and this I consider to be their book’s major contribution — that their research ‘has demonstrated how, across the long 1960s, mental health professionals intervened in cinema culture in unprecedented ways, changing how films were conceived, produced, censored, exhibited and received’, in particular by replacing earlier formulaic approaches to psychiatric conditions and enriching established film genres with original case history material.
Andrea Sabbadini is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society in private practice in London. He is a consultant to the International Psychoanalytical Association in Culture committee and the founder and former Director of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival. His several books, all published by Routledge, include Moving Images: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Film (2014) and Boundaries and Bridges: Perspectives on Time and Space in Psychoanalysis (2015).
