Psychology: The All-Knowing Censor

In 1916, flanking Freud’s Hollywood invasion, psychologist Hugo Münsterberg wrote The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, officially setting into motion psychology and psychiatry’s influence over cinema. Münsterberg had studied under Wilhelm Wundt before heading Harvard University’s psychological laboratory in the late 1800s. “The [movie] screen,” he wrote, “ought to offer a unique opportunity to interest wide circles in psychological experiments and mental tests. …”

Münsterberg was one of the first to suggest that psychologists, as self-appointed experts on the mind, should be hired to advise the film industry. Provocatively, he claimed that films could be “fraught with dangers” and that “the possibilities of psychical infection and destruction cannot be overlooked.”

More than 70 years later, his advice still echoes in the voices of his modern-day cohorts: “… Psychoanalytically informed criticism can be an extremely important aid to understanding the special hold that the movies have on audiences,” a 1987 book on psychiatry and the cinema asserted. And in 1990, Beverly Hills psychotherapist Carole Lieberman also promoted a censoring role for her ilk when she recommended in the Los Angeles Times that psychotherapists be used to provide “expert opinion regarding psychologically damaging content.” She employed an ominous threat of governmental action to obtain acceptance of her idea: “If the movie industry wants to retain the privilege of self-regulation and stem the dangerous tide of censorship … it needs to be more responsible.”

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