(“De/Ciphering Id/Entities”: German Graduate Student Symposium, Washington University in St. Louis, February 20, 2010)
In order to introduce Weimar film audiences to the potentials of the psychoanalytical talking cure, G. W. Pabst's 1926 Secrets of a Soul dramatized the "true" case-study of a chemist, who, though unable to father a child with his wife, seems to be living quite contently until a series of occurrences one morning cause him to become mentally ill, as various suppressed desires and dissatisfactions surface. The startling events of that morning, however, do not seem to be the only trigger for the husband's psychoses. A pattern seems to emerge involving the acquisition of assorted Asian figures; the strength of the husband's illness corresponds to the amount of foreign images and objects which appear in the film's scenes. These objects represent a disturbance to both the European, bourgeois idea of family as well as to the husband's sexuality. The items, as well as the husband's imaged vision of his best friend, both a world traveler and competitor for his wife's affection, work in a positive and negative light; they stir up the husband's madness, but, if they did not do this, the husband's dangerous unconscious compulsions would have remained suppressed just enough to prevent him from ever seeking out psychoanalytical help, and thus would have prevented him from ever fathering his desired offspring.
As the husband enters into his "psychological conflict" due to a murder across the street and his own accidental nicking of his wife's neck with a razor, his madness is heightened and accentuated by the appearance of exotic objects. These objects, representing a distant Other, add to his fears of impotence and infidelity. In this film, and in many others, madness is depicted in various forms. In his book Madness and Cinema, Patrick Fuery identifies three versions of madness representation in cinema, each serving as a metaphor for society’s anxieties. The first version of madness attaches itself to what is considered an invading ideology (18). The second version places the madness attribute onto society itself – in 1950s, for example, the fear of invasion became a key reason for the creation of real-world policy and law - "cultural paranoia" became flesh. Finally, the third version is the fear of madness itself, or the fear of the irrational behavior that madness causes in otherwise rational individuals. As Fuery points out, this form of madness has a long history, existing ever since one society encountered a foreign system, an Other. This representation particularly gained momentum over the last few centuries: "One of its most direct historical links is the twin forces of the eighteenth century's sense of the civilized order against the cultures of the Otherness, and the colonisation ideologies of the nineteenth century" (19). In other words, Fuery continues, the colonizer realizes that, just as he feels compelled to impose control and a "rational culture" onto another, radically different society, he must also impose control over the unconscious. Fear and cultural paranoia stem from this need for control. Thus, one of the key defining motifs of madness, particularly in the visual language of cinema, is the image of something drastically different – something foreign.
The chemist's house contains a small number of foreign objects at the beginning of the film, such as a large, black elephant statue and a sizable figurine of an unidentified Hindu goddess kept in a glass case. The advancement of the chemist's mental illness coincides with the arrival of additional Asian artifacts, gifts from the cousin, accompanied by the notice of his imminent arrival and a photograph, which features the cousin in a pith helmet. Just as the descent into madness is marked by an increase in foreign symbols, the path towards a full cure is benchmarked by a gradual reduction in these figures. For example, as the husband begins his talking cure and relates to the psychoanalyst the events that transpired the morning of the murder, his head rests on a pillow bearing various Indian symbols, such as elephants and lotus flowers. As the cure progresses and the husband begins to delve deeper and deeper into his subconscious, this pillow is replaced with one bearing more abstract, European-style embroidered patterns. When the chemist returns home, the cousin's artifacts have disappeared from the table in front of the fireplace; once again, only the elephant and unidentified goddess are visible. This scene is followed by the epilogue, where all foreign objects have vanished and the newly-completed family has seemingly relocated to a rural, stereotypically-German environment. The madness has been cured, the foreign has been expelled, and a stable family has been established.
The various Oriental items do not, however, only serve to mark the progression of the husband's illness and cure. They also serve as a powerful metaphor for the lack of sexual know-how on both the husband's part and on the part of Weimar society in general. The Weimar Republic saw the emergence of a large discourse on the role and form of sex. Various scientific manuals appeared, attempting to explain methods that men could use to pleasure their partners. The book Ideal Marriage by Theodor Hendrik von de Velde, for example, sought to turn men into guides who would help both partners achieve pleasure, which would in turn set the foundation for happier, healthier families. Most men, he wrote, made love without thought to their partners: "They were fast and sometimes brutal, concerned only with their own orgasms" (Weitz 299). Other sex reformers, such as Wilhelm Reich and Max Hodann, looked to other, more exotic cultures for lessons in lovemaking. The general idea was that European men reached orgasm quickly, while "primitive" societies focused instead on slow, gentle sex: "[Hodann] found an alternative model in 'the Orient' and the gentle art of lovemaking, so he said, that the Indians, Japanese and Muslims all practiced. 'Naturalness' about sex 'today still lives in the Orient,' though it has been lost to Christian society" (302).
This difference between European and Oriental sex is also depicted in Secrets of a Soul. Over the course of their conversations, the psychoanalyst asks the chemist why he has given up hope of ever conceiving a child. The forlorn husband proceeds to tell the doctor about the various fantasies he has had about his wife in "shameful situations". The scene switches to a shot of the husband peering through the loops of a wall, with a sad look on his face. At first, when the camera adopts a point of view shot, a group of unrelated women, scantily clad in harem outfits, can be seen reclining on a large bed, chatting with one another. The camera cuts back to the husband's face, which portrays a look of horror and disgust. The camera then opens the harem scene up, so that a second bed becomes visible. The four girls on the first bed continue chatting and they voyeuristically look on (with joy, in opposition to the distressed husband) at the scene transpiring on the second one. Reclining on this bed is the cousin, smoking a hookah pipe while being caressed by the chemist's wife, also scantily clad. The entire scene is filled with exotic, harem-like elements: Persian rugs, silky sheets and various exotic, tropical birds. The cousin's belly is over exaggerated, much larger than normal; his posture and clothing help fashion him into the picture of a wealthy sheik. The husband looks on in disgust as his wife and her cousin proceed to flirt widely with one another, biting a handkerchief and eventually bending down into a deep kiss, with the implication that this cut-off vision progresses into more intimate sexual acts. As this transpires, the wife's face shows elation; she is completely focused on the cousin and she actively participates.
This scene contrasts sharply with the laboratory portion of the husband's dream. After witnessing his wife pull a baby from the lily pond and present it to her cousin, the husband angrily grabs hold of a Japanese dagger and proceeds to stab with an upwards-thrusting motion at a ghostly image of his wife. His lab assistant looks on. The lab assistant, unlike the harem girls, does not smile in shared sexual pleasure, but instead laughs mockingly at the husband's attempted display of force and power. This is a futile attempt on the husband's part; his wife seems to be completely unaware of his actions, as she smiles and waves at someone unseen – there are no signs of sexual participation on her part. Neither she or her husband need be present; there is no chance of insemination, and thus no start of a family here. The chemist stabs quickly, until the dream ends abruptly with his screaming. This would, then, correspond with Hodann's and Reich's notions that typical European male, represented by the chemist, creates deep-rooted psychological problems due to his quick, violent, one-sided view of sex, whereas a gentle, loving approach, like the dream’s version of the well-traveled cousin, is the more appropriate method of lovemaking. Only by adopting this model of sexual pleasure, sex reformer Wilhelm Reich argued, could serious mental and health problems be prevented and cured: "Reich, perhaps the most radical of the sex reformers, argued that sexual repression was a 'plague' that cut across all the class divisions of society, 'shattering' individuals high and low and leading to serious neuroses. The appropriate therapy was 'the achievement of a gratifying sex life'" (303).
The husband's unconsciousness, coupled with the frustration of impotency, locates a model figure and attributes to this figure great sexual prowess. The wife's cousin, who has traveled much of Southeast Asia, becomes the figure of a sexual explorer or conqueror in the husband's mental image. Though the cousin only wears a flat, European cap in the "real world" scenes, the husband always associates his friend with one specific exotic and virile hat in the assorted dream and memory sequences, even when, as in the harem scene, a different head-covering (such as a turban) would be more fitting for his character and costume. In the photographs accompanying the homecoming presents, as well as in all the husband's dream images, the cousin wears a pith helmet, which is phallic in shape. The pith helmet also represents madness of the second variety: a societal fear. The pith helmet was most commonly associated with the British Empire, the largest colonial power at the time. Though the cousin's gifts are actually Japanese, the title cards refer to them as Indian, and they would thus also come from a colonized location. According to the accompanying letter, the cousin is heading home after just leaving Sumatra, the largest island of Indonesia and, at the time of Pabst's film, a Dutch colony. These references to various colonial powers highlight the political and economic situation of Germany between the World Wars; just as the husband feels impotent and trapped in comparison to his free-roaming friend, so Germany felt when compared to the other great European powers. Following World War 1, Germany was forced by the Treaty of Versailles to give up the small number of colonies it had acquired, in a way being castrated by the Allies (Weitz 35).
The husband, though outwardly pleased at the phone call announcing the arrival of his cousin, drops a vial, shattering it. As he later relates to the psychoanalyst: "He is my best friend. Shortly after our wedding he left us – to go to the tropics – I was never consciously jealous of him-." The final line of that statement reveals that the husband himself realizes that not only is he now consciously jealous of the cousin, he was always jealous of him, even as a child. As revealed to the husband and the audience in the final scenes with the psychoanalyst, this underlying jealousy emerged during the taking of a childhood photograph, which references the neuroses-starting safari photograph of the cousin. After the childhood photograph is taken, the wife and cousin play in a corner by a castle and train tracks, symbols of travel, with the wife's doll. The husband looks at a real baby, and then longingly looks at his future wife's doll, becoming sullen after she gives it to the cousin. This connects to another exotic scene in the husband's dream, as he looks on from behind the bars of his laboratory jail cell. His wife and her cousin sail through a still pond filled with tropical water lilies. The husband describes the pool as being filled with "dark, turbulent water," though that perhaps more closely describes the pool of feelings building up inside of him as he watches his wife. She pulls a doll from the water and shares it with her cousin, much like a mother who has just given birth eagerly shares a newborn infant in a loving embrace with her husband.
The scene seems to suggest that, in the husband’s unconsciousness, it is the world-traveling cousin, again wearing his pith helmet, who is most appropriate to father children; the womb is represented by the pool filled with floating Indian lotus blossoms. He is a master of the foreign, taking charge of exotic lands and locations, and thus is able to take charge of reproductive and romantic matters as well. This stands in contrast to the dream image of the husband's honeymoon. As the chemist narrates to the psychoanalyst: "In the dream, a small Italian city – one I saw frequently on our honeymoon – emerged before my eyes. A bell tower grew steeply out of the ground-." The bell tower is another phallic symbol. The husband attempts to conquer it, but running up the ramp is a slow, arduous process. Once he reaches the top, the bells transform into the faces of his wife, maid and lab assistant and the rings become mocking laughter at his impotence. Again, this laugh is to be distinguished from the joyful, pleased laughter of the harem girls. The implication here is that the husband has difficulty in a foreign location as close by and as familiar as Italy; he cannot climb the heights of a European Other, and thus has no hope in the great wide world the cousin travels through. By failing in this not-so-far location, and by failing on his honeymoon, an important time for establishing his sexual identity in his marriage, the husband is revealed to be impotent.
This is not to say, however, that foreign objects and their symbolic meanings serve only to doom the husband to infertility. In fact, without the appearance of these objects and the husband's illness, the couple probably would never have been able to have a child and the happy German ending depicted in the epilogue. In some ways, the arrival of exotic objects proves fortunate for the couple. The husband feels impotent even before the letter from his cousin, as he has failed to produce offspring; this is clear from the visit of a little girl to his laboratory. If the solution for sexual repression and lackluster performance is "the achievement of a gratifying sex life" as Reich and Hodann argued, then the forced revelation of the husband's neuroses can be seen as a positive force, which initiates the beginning of therapy. It is thus appropriate that the emergence of his illness coincides with the arrival of the cousin's gifts. The statue, though identified by the subtitles as an "Indian goddess," is a Japanese Maria Kannon (マリア観音) statue – the very statue depicted in the movie is in fact a near replica of a famous Maria Kannon held in the Nantoyoosoo collection in Nagasaki, Japan. Originally, Kannon was a male deity named Ava-loki-tes-vara ("Lord who looks down from on high") known for his compassion who helped those in need. As the deity moved northward from India into China, he was renamed Guanschiyin, or "one who observes the cries of the world." The Chinese also shifted Kannon's gender, and by the sixteenth century Kannon representations were almost exclusively female. Kannon proved to be quite popular in the Western world as well, often being compared to the Virgin Mary. This association was adopted by some in Japan as well; when Christianity began to be persecuted in the seventeenth century, many Japanese Christians appropriated Kannon as a way to secretly practice their own religion while appearing to be devout Buddhists. This Maria Kannon is almost always represented as a benevolent mother figure embracing a baby. It was not uncommon for crosses to be hidden away within the statue, underneath the warm hug of parent and child (Horton 79-80).
In other words, the statue is not a completely foreign object. Even if it is not consciously known to the characters in the story, the statue represents a synthesis precisely like that which Hodmann promoted: a combination of the gentleness and compassion of the Orient with the morals and structure of Western Christianity. The statue's gentleness is highlighted by its contrast to the dagger. As Ira Konigsberg comments in her essay "Cinema, Psychoanalysis, and Hermeneutics" the dagger, as indicated in the dream sequence, is a destructive, phallic object, while the statue is compassionate and represents maternity (23). This symbol of maternity stirs feelings of failure in the husband. In the dream sequence, the statue's face is temporarily replaced by his wife's face, providing the chemist with a brief vision of his wife with child, though this image disappears as the husband longingly reaches out for it. In the real world, this unconscious disappointment leads to an impulse to murder his wife. After he returns from eating alone in the male-dominated pub, where he could avoid judgment from his wife and her cousin at his inability to use the phallic knife, the husband sits in front of the maternity statue. The camera quickly cuts back and forth between the Maria Kannon statuette and the husband’s face, highlighting the husband’s furrowed eyebrows and clear anger and frustration.
As his wife places her head lovingly in his lap, he aggressively grabs hold of the back of it (without, it seems, any resistance from his wife). His glance, and thus the camera’s glance, alternates between the back of her head, where he can see the initial cut he inflicted on her with the razor, and the Japanese dagger lying at the foot of the maternity statue, parallel to its decorated sheath. After switching back to the neck of his wife, the husband and the camera seem to consider her neck from various angles, as if trying to determine where the ideal striking location would be. We see the husband very slowly lift his gaze back up to the knife, the base of the statue still visible, a constant reminder of what has kindled his unconscious ire. A dot of light then traces along the blade, an intentional use of an outside light source by the filmmakers to force the audience to trace with their eyes the gaze of a crazed man as he contemplates that sharp edge. The camera switches back to view the husband, his eyes hungry, as his free arm slowly reaches for the dagger.
This Asian dagger, which he almost takes hold of in real life, is what he picks up in his dream; it is the most important symbol for his sexual impotence. It is not, however, the only Oriental phallic or sexual symbol surrounding him. In both the real and dream worlds, the chemist, when dressed up in his day suit, carries around a bamboo cane. Not only does this give him the appearance, in some scenes, of a Chaplinesque tramp, further highlighting his buffoonery with regards to familial and sexual matters, it once again links Asia to a phallic symbol which the chemist cannon properly use. The cane is never used as a proper walking stick, but is held up, almost as a defensive shield, in all of the scenes in which it appears. In addition to this, the chemist has one other imported clothing item: his pajamas. The silky pajamas sport large Chinese button knots, and it is while wearing these pajamas that the husband nicks his wife’s neck with the razor and has his troubling dream. Within the dream itself, the husband tries to fly away from the safari-hunting cousin, perched up high in a tree. Though the silk-clad, nicely decorated bird of a husband tries to flap away as high as he can, the cousin is still the better, skillfully taking down him down with a single shot of his rifle.
It is only when the husband picks up a non-Asian phallic symbol that he is declared cured of his illness. After reliving the flashback involving the doll, the husband jumps up, grabs the ornate, European letter opener off of the psychoanalyst’s desk, and proceeds to stab with it just as he had with the Japanese dagger in his dream, angry and disheveled as he involves his entire body into the thrusting motions. After he stops thrusting and begins to catch his breath, the psychoanalyst stands and, smiling, comments: "Have you noticed what you’re holding in your hand?" The husband, looking down at the knife and at his strong grip on the handle, says: "I am able to hold a knife again." Indeed, not only is he able to hold a knife again, but from this point on, as the epilogue suggests, the husband no longer suffers performance issues. Again, this breakthrough did not happen with the Japanese dagger or some other Asian item, but with a European letter opener.
After he is cured, the husband returns home, where he is greeted by his wife and his friend. The chemist warmly embraces the cousin; the right-hand side of the screen is dominated by the large, black elephant statue which first made its appearance at the start of the crucial thunderstorm, as the housekeeper dusted it. The camera then switches to the wife, looking on with a wide smile. She is also not alone, as the left-hand side of the screen is filled with a giant figure of a Hindu goddess, safely closed away behind a glass case. Since the husband’s unconscious struggles have finally been confronted, the Asian artifacts which take up a great portion of these scenes are no longer causes for concern. They too disappear, as the camera shifts from the wife to a completely German scene, out in nature with an Alpine background, lederhosen, and a happy new family. The existence of family, and with it the husband’s ability to feel potent and capable, guarantee that a slip back into "psychological darkness" will not occur again. The foreign objects, as we have seen, not only helped the husband sink into this darkness, but also enabled him to overcome an unconscious problem which, had it not surfaced, would have prevented him and his wife from reaching the idyllic scene depicted in the film's epilogue.
Fuery, Patrick. Madness and Cinema: Psychoanalysis, Spectatorship and Culture. New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2004.
Horton, Sarah J. Living Buddhist Statues in Early Medieval and Modern Japan. New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2007.
Konigsberg, Ira. “Cinema, Psychoanalysis, and Hermeneutics: G.W. Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul”. The Movies: Texts, Receptions, Exposures. Ed. Laurence Goldstein and Ira Konigsberg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Secrets of a Soul. Dir. G.W. Pabst. Ufa, 1926. DVD (Kino, 2008).
Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.