IMPORTANT FACTS

1. In 1916, German psychologist Hugo M�nsterberg wrote The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, officially setting into motion psychology and psychiatry�s influence over cinema. M�nsterberg claimed the film industry could be �fraught with dangers� that required psychological �advice.�

2. In 1924, Samuel Goldwyn of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer tried to get Sigmund Freud to help devise �a really great love story.� Freud, who was critical of artists, declined. Yet, his now-discredited theories were widely adopted at the time by the film industry.

3. Psychiatrists, such as Karl Menninger, used the film industry to finance their own movement and agenda.

4. On the advice of psychiatrists and psychologists, studios sent actors for psychoanalysis, which often led to them being placed on powerful mindaltering and addictive drugs that would eventually ruin their careers and lives.

5. Nazi psychiatrists wrote a series of scripts later known as �The Killing Films� and used the German film industry to propagate their false and destructive racial hygiene theories.

CHAPTER ONE Psychiatry and Film, A Fatal Attraction

At the end of the 19th century, two developments took place in Europe, which would greatly influence the way many would view themselves and society. In 1879, in Leipzig, German professor of psychology Wilhelm Wundt announced with great authority, albeit with no scientific foundation, that man was no more than a soulless animal, a mere product of his environment. It was a statement that signaled the birth of experimental psychology and a new direction for psychiatry.

In the late 1890s, in Vienna, Austria, Sigmund Freud declared man to be a product of his childhood misfortunes and sexual hang-ups. Along with this equally unproven theory, which has since been largely discredited, came a new subject: psychoanalysis.

Wherever people have applied the fundamental concepts of these practices, society has experienced radical changes. Arts and entertainment are among the fields that have been greatly and adversely affected by them.

In the early 1900s, signs plastered on storefronts in Hollywood advertised �PSYCHOANALYSIS, READINGS� for $3 to $5. As countless artists were attracted to Hollywood at the time, they were bombarded with Freudian messages.

A passage from Celia Bertin�s biography on Princess Marie Bonaparte, an eager student of Freudian psychology, gives some idea of how his ideas caught on: �Freud was now so famous that Hollywood asked him to cooperate in writing scripts based on world-famous love stories, starting with �Antony and Cleopatra.�� Samuel Goldwyn of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) fame sailed to Europe in 1924 with a mission: to get Freud to help devise �a really great love story.�

Freud declined. Little wonder. Of art and artists, Freud said: �Meaning is but little with these men [artists]; all they care about is line, shape, agreement of contours.� Yet, although he was no lover of the cinema or stage, Freud had no problem becoming �an avid interpreter [critic] of the arts.�

Helped in many ways by Hollywood, Freudian thought quickly entered the mainstream culture. By 1925, a popular song had the title, �Don�t Tell Me What You Dreamed Last Night, for I�ve Been Reading Freud.� The movie �Blind Alley� (1939) starred Ralph Bellamy as Dr. Shelby, lecturing on the supposedly thin line dividing madness and sanity. Even Fred Astaire played a �dancing psychiatrist� who fell in love with his patient (Ginger Rogers). Of course, in the movie it all worked out all right in the end. Unlike in real life, where that movie image falls away quickly before the truth of the matter.

Psychiatrists and psychologists are known to have the highest incidence of any healthcare practitioners for criminality, including sexual abuse of patients (women and children). The number of criminal prosecutions and license revocations for psychologists and psychiatrists has been on an increase for many years.

The fact that many of Freud�s now-dismissed theories were developed while he was an avid user of cocaine was not known at the time. His ideas and those of other psychoanalysts and psychiatrists also entered Hollywood through social channels, made fashionable, for example, by Adeline Jaffe Schulberg, wife of pioneer producer, B. P. Schulberg. As Bud Schulberg wrote: �The whole country � seemed to be going off on one prolonged toot of bathtub gin, dance crazes, and a newly liberated sense of sex. It was fun to drink because you weren�t supposed to, to fornicate because Dr. Freud had now informed you that it was time to let your id take over from that puritanical superego. If the whole country was going to the party, why should Hollywood be any different? And if the Hollywood party was excessive, it was only because Hollywood had always been an excessive, speeded-up, larger-than-life reflection of the American Way.�

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