FELLINI'S PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

A lot of people don't know that Fellini used to be a cartoonist, and that he kept an extensive visual  journal of his dreams during the period when he made his best films.

Fellini was being analyzed at the time, and a lot of his cartoons have psycho-analytic themes.


The analysis seemed to have served him well, if you can judge by his drawings. I love the way the woman above casually touches the Moon...or is the face above her head just someone she knows?  Either way, it's a different approach than you see in most sketchbooks. 

His analyst told him to keep a record of his dreams and you can buy it for the princely sum of $125.  Man, books are expensive!

 


Fellini's analyst was a Jungian. Jungians believe that the unconscious is where our true psyche resides. According to Wikipedia, the unconscious expresses itself to us through dreams, which are an attempt of the mind to resolve contradictions between the narrow, literal conscious and the expansive, intuitive, creative unconscious. If troubled, we can only find peace by finding out what the unconscious mind has to teach us about the situation, and for that Jungians use dream analysis. 

I'm not a Jungian myself, I just can't see much evidence to back it up, but I can imagine how persistent analysis of dreams could benefit an artist.  In spite of my skepticism, if I ever entered analysis I'd probably do the same thing Fellini did , and try the Jungian method.


Look what it did for Fellini! Wouldn't you say that his brilliant "8 1/2" was one long stream of dream images held together by a flimsy plot? Don't get me wrong, I love plot and I love tight stories, but I also like the way plot and intuition come together in films like the ones Clampett made. There's room for both, don't you think?


I just thumbed through the Fellini book at the bookstore, and was amazed at how many of his dreams had to do with sex. That shouldn't have surprised me; I mean, he's a man after all.  He seemed to be trying to come to terms with the strange, larger-than-life women around him. for Fellini they were big, gaudy, flamboyant creatures who were obsessed and manic about issues that men find puzzling and don't even understand. They were alternately mothering and sentimental, and scheming and flighty. We lust after them and they return the lust...or not. It depends on the mood they're in.

I wonder if analysis helped Fellini to come up with the unforgettable primal images in his films. I've seen lots of lovers-in-the-fountain scenes in movies, but none so memorable as the ones in "La Dolce Vita" (above and below).

Why is this beautiful girl with big breasts so attractive here, or have I just asked a stupid question? I think it has something to do with the large area between the breasts and face, and the contrast of the solid black gown. I wouldn't be surprised if Fellini drew these scenes before filming them.  I saw several images in the book that could have been this woman, and a couple were surrounded by yellow marker auras that indicated that she radiated something intense.

The actress brings a lot to it.  She's so mysterious, so languid, so living in the moment and aloof from anything but the water...and there's um...well, those big breasts! 

I wonder if Fellini drew Mastriani's outfit in 8 1/2 and had the costume custom-made for the film. There's something iconic about it. 

Olivier said he needed costume to get into a character. He hated rehearsals which weren't dress rehearsals. Is it costume that makes Mastriani so special in this film?

Was that hat (above) made from a drawing just for the film? That and the glasses make Mastriani one of the most remembered characters in the history of film. Did dream analysis somehow contribute to this?

Note: Thanks to Michael Sporn's July 2007 blog entry for some of the images used here.

LET'S BRING BACK PSYCHOANALYSIS (REVISED)

I'm an admirer of Freud now but I wasn't always. I used to feel uncomfortable with ideas like childhood sexuality, the centrality of dreams, and the existence of the subconscious. I'm not aware that the fantasies and dreams I had when I was a kid had any influence on my adult life, and I just couldn't see any evidence for a subconscious. When I read that Freud was an advocate of cocaine, that tore it, I just dropped him from my thoughts. Now I'm beginning to wonder if I was too hasty.

When you think about it, psychoanalysis is an interesting idea. Modern methods of counseling nudge the patient toward normal behavior. They aim to produce a functioning citizen, and that's all. Psychoanalysis on the other hand, attempts to take the patient on a weird and fantastic journey through uncharted territory. The patient becomes Odysseus or Jason. He matures and deepens and sometimes even becomes heroic through conflict with demons from the netherworld. When the cure is arrived at the patient can look back on his trip as one of his great life experiences. The goal is not simply to create a citizen but to create a brave, powerful and wise human being.

Of course analysis is expensive and time-consuming and I imagine that a lot depends on the character of the analyst. Probably over time analysis became somewhat dry and formulistic. Maybe that's because society changed and shed its romantic roots. The analysts thought they were following Freud's rules because they stuck to what he said in print, but they neglected to add the flavor and feel of the romantic era that produced Freud. Some of the rules for psychoanalysis were unwritten because in Freud's time they were taken for granted. Things like the love of heroism and the passion for adventure were the common belief of everyone then living. You can't undertake analysis without a strong sense of this, yet it might not appear anywhere in the writing.

I know what you're thinking. All that journey stuff is fine but when it comes down to it, what really matters is, does it work? Was Freud right? My answer is that it probably doesn't work a lot of the time, but who cares? The journey is enriching all by itself, regardless of the outcome. You may come out of it a neurotic, but you'll be a more interesting neurotic.

All of us in the arts have something to be grateful to Freud for. He influenced all the arts, maybe literary novels and acting especially , but also painting, photography and even genre fiction like horror, sci-fi and thrillers. And what about politics? Freud's emphasis on sexuality and looking inward was one of the cornerstones of the 60s.

Freud is a gold mine of inspiration for writers. It must be a lot of fun to write scenes like: "I dreamed I was in a room with two tables, each with a vase of flowers and a clock. I tried to smell the flowers but I was overcome with a feeling of dread, as if the flowers didn't want me there, and the clocks began to tick, louder and louder . Outside I heard a car slam on its brakes and a loud crash. I tried to run to the window to see what happened, but..." And you have to admit that Freud-influenced screen plays provide much-needed work for Theramin operators.

It would be hard to over-estimate Freud's influence on the modern world. He took a lot that was over-the-top about 19th century literary romanticism and repackaged in the form of therapy for the 20th century. No small feat, that. Maybe Freud was the greatest of the Romantics.

It's a stretch, but you could argue that Freud was one of the people who saved the West from communism. Marxism was spreading like wildfire among intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th century and it only hit a stone wall when it came up against Freud and the nationalist romantics. Freud's ideas weren't antagonistic to Marx, but they represented another systematic way of seeing the world, which existed completely outside of Marxism. After Freud, Marxism was not the "next new thing"...it was just one of a number of new things.