The Secret Passion: Sartre, Huston, and the Freud screenplay

How can philosophical ideas be represented in or explored through the medium of film? In this chapter, I explore this question through a reading of Sartre’s script and John Huston’s film about the young Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis. The screenplay manages to combine an account of Freud’s development towards the “talking cure” with an “existentialist” interpretation of Freud’s struggle to develop psychoanalysis as a “fundamental project” through which he arrives at self-understanding and freedom in respect of his past. Sartre acknowledges parallels but also disagreements with Freudian psychoanalysis, revealing that the relationship between existentialism and psychoanalysis is more complex than generally assumed. One of the difficulties Sartre encountered was finding ways of presenting Freud’s ideas while ensuring dramatic plausibility and cinematic credibility on screen. Sartre’s portrayal of the young Freud as a conflicted, impassioned “outsider” sheds important light on Sartre’s complex relationship with psychoanalysis, while Huston’s finished film (Freud: A Secret Passion) provides a striking exploration of psychoanalysis that compares favourably with more recent biopic efforts such as Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (2011). The Sartre, Huston, Freud screenplay, thereby provides a fascinating case study for the exploration of the complex relationship between film and philosophy.