Freud’s last session
A personal reflection on the film
Freud, God and CS Lewis a film that ticked quite a few of my boxes. Anthony Hopkins played a convincing Freud and Matthew Goode suitably played CS Lewis.
As I said to Chai after “It was educational rather than entertaining”
The film revolved around Freud’s home in Hampstead. It may have worked better as a play than a film. There was too much answering the phone, turning the radio on and off, getting medication and pouring drinks. It was like watching two people converse over a day.
I never knew Freud died of mouth cancer. The film is set three weeks before he died so a whole lot of handkerchiefs are needed. I found myself concerned that Freud would become gravely ill but then after a little whisky, and some drugs he would bounce back into the conversation.
They were meeting on the day war was declared on Germany which meant the radio was on and off for updates. I didn’t know that Freud only agreed to come to London from Austria after his daughter Anna was arrested and held by the Gestapo. In the film, Freud speaks of it as an awakening that moved him to act. I could relate to that often I will not act until I am forced to.
I once visited Freud’s home in Hampstead. No not for psychoanalysis he was well dead by then but as a visitor to what is now a museum. I was struck by his living room full of artefacts from various quarters of the world. Lewis commented on them in the film to which Freud replied something to the effect “For someone who passionately doesn’t believe I passionately collect the artefacts of those who do.”
Often our interest in opposing something can be as passionate as those who hold what we oppose.
The war was in the background as was Anna his daughter. There was an absence of the rest of Freud’s family. Freud’s words, at least in the film, “I am more interested in what is not said” could be applied.
A story was being conveyed that Anna was certainly his favourite. There seemed to be a codependency between them. It is often the case that the expert in a field is not an expert in their own life. There was a subtext going on which could lead you to many fantasies of what was going on. The film also conveyed a story about Lewis and the mother of a soldier friend. The film seemed to tell a story about the sexual tension that exists within us all. Freud never shied from saying that the whole of life was embued by sex (at least my interpretation).
What we had in the film were two men who idolised a belief, one in God and the other in psychoanalysis. Was it that Freud was trying to live out his life in the shadow of psychoanalysis and Lewis in his stories about God? Don’t we all do that; try to live out our lives in the shadow of that which consumes us?
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