Freud on Netflix review – the thinker deserves better than this macabre mini-series

Sigmund Freud shares with Charles Darwin the distinction of having left a legacy which has insinuated itself into the cultural mainstream. His ideas and concepts have become part of our everyday lives, even if often in corrupted or misrepresented ways. But there is a striking difference between the two men: Darwin was a scientist, while Freud was not. Freud was put forward for a Nobel Prize twelve times until the Nobel Committee sought an expert view which concluded that Freud’s work was of no proven scientific worth. Freud’s work was, in the words of Karl Popper, pseudoscience which unlike true science was designed to support preconceived theories rather than challenge them through experiments. Freud told stories rather than conducted experiments. He was a man of “myths”, of wide learning and huge influence, though it would seem he was neither entirely scrupulous nor wholly ethical in his work. He has many times been accused of falsifying the facts of at least some patients’ personal histories in order to substantiate or advance some of his theories. He conducted therapy sessions on members of his own family, including his daughter, which, given his theories about the psychosexual origins of much mental illness was, to say the least, far from appropriate. Freud is a cultural giant with wobbly, unscientific, legs.

The eight episodes of the Netflix mini-series simply called Freud, will do nothing to bolster Sigmund’s reputation (or “Ziggy’s” as he is sometimes called on screen). The story line is anarchic. Part gothic horror served up with lashings of blood and assistance from a Medium under the control of two corrupt Hungarian aristocrats intent on securing invitations to the annual Imperial Ball. Part detective series with Freud as a sub-standard Sherlock Holmes supplying analytical titbits to a Viennese police officer who himself requires psychoanalytical help. Part biopic with only a scattered regard for Freud’s true life story, alongside a sort of history of the later years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire mixed with entirely fictional elements and fantastic excursions into a Shaman-induced assault on the Emperor Franz-Josef and the Imperial Family. Nausea and hysteria were part of the Freudian psychoanalytical landscape and they are given full rein in this supposed depiction of Vienna in the late 1880s. Stray remarks in the script suggest the Hapsburg world is itself part of a burgeoning disintegration of Western society, of a collective nausea eating away at Europe’s vitals and hastening a “cleansing” war. The relentless depiction of unbridled, hysterical violence and bloodletting are hard to stomach; and the sexual preoccupations hyper-Freudian. The mini-series is more gory than glamorous, more seedy than seductive. The sewers of Vienna are employed repeatedly and all too obviously as a metaphor for the darker “unknowns” in the human psyche.

The series is not wholly without merit, although such merits as it has are technical ones. Beautifully filmed on location in Prague, a city whose architecture remains largely untouched by the twentieth century, its elegant and also its less elegant buildings serve as very realistic substitutes for those of late nineteenth century Vienna. A febrile atmosphere is effectively generated, reflecting corrosive poverty and deprivation alongside the corruption of an upper class society addled by numerous military codes and practices. A German/Austrian film production originally launched (in German of course) on an Austrian TV station, it has been very well rendered in English for its Netflix release. The main actors are not well known outside the German-speaking world, but they deliver fine individual performances, notably Robert Finster as Freud, Ella Rumpf as the medium and Georg Friedrich as the investigating Police Officer.

Each episode of the Freud series is given a rather pretentious title echoing key themes in Freud’s psychoanalytic writings. Thus the viewer transits from Hysteria via Sleepwalker to Totem and Taboo and onto Regression and Catharsis. Under these banner headlines the chaos and hysteria in the film script and direction are unconstrained and, in Freud’s personal case, fuelled by generous doses of cocaine. What the writer and director hoped to achieve with Freud is far from apparent. Part of the difficulty is that as the twentieth century progressed, Freud’s writings and theories became increasingly untethered from their origins as they mainstreamed through Western intellectual society. Ideas and approaches to mental illness which in their early formation already had attendant problems, ran rampant well beyond the immediate field of psychoanalysis, affecting innumerable aspects of contemporary society. A superstructure of myth lent a somewhat specious underpinning to ideas not well-grounded in any scientific method. Freud serves to reinforce the most outlandish aspects of Freud’s legacy and to diminish Freud rather than to offer any grounds to celebrate him. For all his weaknesses and faults, Freud deserves better than this macabre mini-series.