Young Dr. Freud

Aside from A Dangerous Method (2011) directed by kosher Canadian auteur David Cronenberg, until rather recently, I did not think there was a film pertaining to the imperative role that his background as an ethnic Eastern European Jew and his hatred of Germanic peoples played on Sigismund Schlomo Freud (otherwise known as Sigmund Freud)—the founding father of the dubious ‘science’ of psychoanalysis—but luckily I recently discovered the docudrama-like made-for-TV ‘biopic’ Der Junge Freud (1976) aka Young Dr. Freud directed by philo-Semitic Austrian auteur Axel Corti (God Does Not Believe in Us Anymore, The King’s Whore) and penned by the director's longtime collaborator Georg Stefan Troller. The son of a man of partial Italian extraction who was a member of the anti-Nazi resistance that died in 1945, Axel Corti (whose birth name was Axel Fuhrmanns, but assumedly changed his surname to ‘Corti’ to show his solidarity with his Guido blood as opposed to his out-of-fashion Teutonic genes) was anything but a National Socialist sympathizer and Austrian nationalist as demonstrated by his Wohin und zurück (1982-1986) aka Where To and Back Trilogy, which follows a Viennese Jew of the far-left persuasion whose father who murdered my Nazis and who ultimately stereotypically flees to New York City and inevitably returns back to Europa as a translator/prison interrogator to deal with them nasty Nazis, so naturally his work Young Dr. Freud takes a somewhat sympathetic view of Sigmund’s Semitism and how it shaped his anti-kraut/anti-bourgeois pseudo-science, even if the film dares to psychoanalyze the ‘soul doctor’ in the process, thereupon demystifying his legacy as a man that practically created a modern form of secular Judaism via psychoanalysis. Beginning in 1938 with Freud boarding a train from Vienna to London so as to escape from Uncle Adolf’s wrath, Young Dr. Freud—as signified by its quite literal title—depicts the degenerate doc’s meager life before he was a Freudian and got addicted to cocaine and cocks, but also and, arguably most importantly, demonstrates how the psychoanalyst’s parents background as Galician Jews made him feel like an outsider of Vienna and born enemy of the Aryan Viennese. Although clearly directed by a man with left-wing sympathies and a respect for Freud, Young Dr. Freud is the sort of biopic that could have never been made in Hollywood because, aside from neglecting to portray the psychoanalyst as a humanitarian hero of sorts and mystifying his life by making a patron saint of the holocaust and humanity, the film also somewhat unintentionally demonstrates that his ‘science’ was not much of a science at all, but an intellectual weapon used by a man who saw himself as a modern day Hannibal as a subversive Semite battling against Western Civilization. 

 Opening with a scene set in 1938 of an old Sigmund Freud boarding a train from Vienna to London, Young Dr. Freud accompanies these images with off-screen narration from an unnamed narrator who acts as a sort of cinematic psychoanalyst throughout the film and states regarding the psychoanalyst, “Of all the wise men of his day, Freud is at this moment the least loved, probably by himself, too,” but, of course, after the Second World War and defeat of the Third Reich, he became a messiah among leftwing and largely Jewish academics and intellectuals who wanted revenge against the Germans and who naturally spread his iconoclastic ideas like the ‘plague’ (notably, Freud once remarked to his then-associate C.G. Jung during a 1909 trip to America that “they don’t know it but I'm bringing them the plague” in regard to introducing his ideas to unsuspecting goy yanks) and have forever tainted Western society, sexualizing everything, including infants. As depicted in the first couple minutes of Young Dr. Freud, Freud (played by veteran Austrian TV actor Karlheinz Hackl) is psychoanalyzed via interviews with an unseen narrator, starting with his childhood as a persecuted Eastern Jew who eventually landed in Vienna as a young child so his father (who came from an unreformed Hasidic Jewish background) could pursue business as a wool merchant, stating of this experience, “Vienna always held terrors for me all my life…About as cosy as an arena…You always felt surrounded by strangers…No, not just strangers, unknown beings…To survive, you had to recognize them.” In a very telling scene, Freud displays his undying disgust and shame for his father after being attacked by peasant anti-Semites and not defending himself, stating, “I never let that happen to me without defending myself,” thus demonstrating he was a born fighter and not a passive victim. When Freud grew up to be a young doctor, he told Dr. Josef Breuer—the Austrian Jewish physician who laid down the foundations for psychoanalysis—that he was disgusted with his teacher’s planned trip to Russia, stating, “In Russia they’re murdering Jews and you go there to your noble patients…But you’re Breuer, not just a Jew…But it’s my people they’re murdering in their pogroms.” When Breuer remarks to Freud that he is “no Eastern Jew,” his combative protégé retorts, “My father is,” thus proudly displaying his deep sense of attachment to his cultural and racial roots. When courting his soon-to-be-wife Martha Bernays (Sylvia Haider), he confesses to her his ultimate goal with his profession is to be, “Some sort of conqueror, I think…An intellectual adventurer…Someone quite ruthless,” which he most certainly will become as a man who will greatly contribute to the destruction of the moral fabric of European civilization. 

 Beginning with attempting to understand how eels manage to copulate despite the fact that male eels might lack testicles, Freud goes on to take on the case of “Anna O.” (pseudonym of Austrian Jewess feminist Bertha Pappenheim) with his teacher Breuer and the two release the cast study Studies on Hysteria (1895), which introduced the technique of psychoanalysis as a form of cure, though the book was initially poorly received. Although highly ambitious, which is largely inspired by his abject hatred of Aryans, anti-Semitic or otherwise, and prophetic paranoia regarding potential pogroms, Freud is crippled by self-doubt and his self-contradictory nature, but luckily his aggressive arrogance compels him to tread on with a vengeance. At the recommendation of an Aryan scientist who does not hate Hebrews, Freud heads to Paris in 1885 for a fellowship with French clinician Jean-Martin Charcot—the so called “Napoleon of the neuroses”—which is a turning point in his career that moved him towards the practice of medical psychopathology which he will be (in)famous for. Freud also starts a long and intellectually deleterious relationship with a crackpot kosher otolaryngologist named Wilhelm Fliess whose theory of 'nasal reflex neurosis' postulated that there was a connection between the nose and genitals (and ultimately relating this theory to a number of neurological and psychological symptoms) and whose idea of ‘innate bisexuality’, among countless other dubious perverse theories, will have an imperative influence on the founding father of psychoanalysis. While dealing with a professor named Dr. Meynert (Norbert Kappen), who criticizes the young Jewish doctor, stating, “You believe in hypnosis? That quackery beneath the dignity of thinking men?,” Freud becomes all the more determined to rebel against what he sees as archaic Aryan science, which rejects that men (as opposed to just women) can be hysterical. Meanwhile, Freud gets hooked on cocaine, stating of its benefits, “it boosts work capacity and relieves depression” and that “It’s a substitute for morphine and doesn’t cause addiction,” thus proving that his theories regarding human sexuality were not the only things he was wrong about. While essentially helping to lead the way for the ‘sexual emancipation’ of women and so called ‘sexual freedom’ for everyone else, Freud did not really practice what he preached as he was scared of pussy, which may have led him to be biased in forming his theory that all humans are bisexual. 

 Ironically concluding with an excerpt from a letter written by Freud to his wife Martha that reads, “Let our biographers sweat. We don’t want to make things easy for them. Let them all be right in their concept of “the hero’s development." I’m looking forward to the mistakes they make,” Young Dr. Freud is probably the most objective and thoughtful biopic ever made about the psychoanalyst as the film neither portrays him as a Hebraic hero nor Semitic saint, but an absurdly arrogant and exceedingly eccentric character whose Eastern Jewish roots could have never been deracinated, but, instead, fueled his career as a proud Semitic subversive whose instincts and interests compelled him to destroy, with extreme prejudice, German mores. Notably, in a passage from his work Interpretation of Dreams, Freud, in an attempt to make sense of why he had a metaphysical aversion to stepping foot in Rome, argued he was sort of retracing the footsteps of Hannibal—the Semitic leader of Carthage—as a member of an “alien race” in an Aryan land, writing, “Hannibal… Had been the favorite hero of my later school days… And when in the higher classes I began to understand for the first time what it meant to belong to an alien race… the figure of the semitic general rose still higher in my esteem. To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic Church,” and the film Young Dr. Freud certainly expresses this strong side of the psychoanalyst, albeit in the abstracted manner of a European attempting to understand a racial outsider. As a man who described himself as “a fanatical Jew” in a 1931 letter and on another occasion writing he had a “strange secret longings” related to his Jewish blood, Freud basically concocted a kosher intellectual weapon through psychoanalysis. As evolutionary psychology Kevin MacDonald wrote in his groundbreaking work The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (2002) regarding Freud and his (un)holy mission against Aryan civilization via psychoanalysis, “His identity as a Jew was thus associated with a self-concept in which he selflessly does battle with the enemies of the group, dying in an act of heroic altruism defending group interests—a mirror-image Jewish version of the grand finale of Wagner’s Nibelungenlied that was an ingredient in Nazi ideology.” 

 A Teutonized Hebrew schooled in Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche who hated the alien world in which he came of age but also hated himself as depicted in scenes from Young Dr. Freud where he remarks “I hate Vienna any time of the year…At present everything makes me vomit, including myself,” Freud was an all around corrosive force who did more harm to the world than good. For example, Freud’s nephew Edward, “the father of public relations,” Bernays would utilize his uncle’s theories on the human mind to brainwash the American populous with subconscious propaganda utilizing psychoanalytic techniques, which is depicted in Adam Curtis's great award-winning 2002 documentary for the BBC, The Century of the Self (2002), a epic work that makes it quite clear that Freudian psychoanalysis was a weapon meant to subvert and defile people and not to help them. After all, where has psychoanalysis gotten daughter-lover Woody Allen, himself a lifelong advocate of psychoanalysis?! In terms of the few Freud flicks that exist, Young Dr. Freud is the best in terms of introducing the lifelong neurosis of the man behind psychoanalysis, ultimately making the Hollywood movie Freud: The Secret Passion (1962) directed by John Huston and starring Montgomery Clift seem like a pseudo-provocative piece of sensationalism and softcore surrealism that gives a redundant reductionist view of the man’s ideas and does not even attempt to touch his Jewishness, arguably the most important influence behind his work.  Shot in black-and-white in a vaguely dreamlike manner, Young Dr. Freud is not exactly a pleasurable picture to watch, but, of course, Freud is not exactly the most heartwarming historical figure to study, thus making the film seem like a suffocating trip through Hebrew intellectual Hades, but an interesting and important one nonetheless that reminds the unconscious gentile viewer that the psychoanalyst did not have their best interests in mind.  As the great so called self-loathing Jew Karl Kraus—one of the earliest critics of psychoanalysis and a sort of intellectual adversary of Freud—once wrote, “The Jews control the press, they control the stockmarket, and now they also control the unconscious.”

-Ty E