John Huston - Freud (1962)

The early career of Viennese based Dr. Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psychoanalysis, is presented. This phase of his story begins in 1885, when he is a researcher in a hospital under the direction of renowned Dr. Theodore Meynert. It is a time when scientific belief is that all human actions are conscious decisions, and anything that would be deemed abnormal behavior is classified as hysteria, the behavior a means to garner attention to oneself. After witnessing the work of Paris based Dr. Charcot - that work demonstrating that patients with hysteria under hypnosis may no longer display their physical maladies based purely on hypnotic suggestion - Freud, under the vehement objections of Dr. Meynert (despite an eventual admission by Meynert to Freud), begins to test his developing theories of a subconscious causing many of these maladies in patients with hysteria. Freud ends up being mentored by older Dr. Joseph Breuer, who not only allows Freud access to his patients with hysteria, but funds what will be listed as their joint research, but which is largely Freud's as Breuer is more the practitioner. Freud's encounters with two of Breuer's patients - Carl von Schlossen, who has delusions of having killed his military father, and young Cecily Koertner, who has a series of medically unexplainable maladies such as blindness and paralysis in both legs and who eventually falls in love with Dr. Breuer - prove both to be dangerous to their overall health and useful in the evolution of what ends up being Freud's controversial theory of the sexual mind in infancy - what is eventually coined the Oedipus complex - being the basis for many of the physical manifestations of hysteria. Freud's work places a strain on his marriage to his faithful wife, Martha Freud, who feels uncomfortable that the wives of his colleagues know more about his work than she does, and uncomfortable with the discussions he has with Breuer's patients about their sexual thoughts.