Spellbound: A Collision of Art and Psychology

There’s some­thing about Hitchcock’s films that draws me. It may be a mis­placed sense of nos­tal­gia, but I sus­pect it’s because his work piques my inner English student’s desire to ana­lyze. Spellbound is no dif­fer­ent. In fact, ana­lyza­tion is prac­ti­cally its sub­ject.

Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) is a psy­chi­a­trist work­ing at a men­tal insti­tu­tion. She’s described as being as stiff as a text­book. She nat­u­rally falls in love at first sight with “Dr. Anthony Edwardes” (Gregory Peck), who claims to be the new head of hos­pi­tal. But Dr. Edwardes is actu­ally an amne­siac who com­pletely falls apart any­time he sees par­al­lel lines dis­turb­ing a white sur­face. Nevertheless, or con­ceiv­ably because of this, Constance and “Edwardes” are com­pletely enam­oured with each other. As they move closer and closer for their first kiss, the scene melts into a beau­ti­ful fog and a series of doors opens along a long hall­way. It’s so pure, so lovely.

But this is Hitchcock, and there must be a twist in their sit­u­a­tion. When the real Dr. Edwardes’s assis­tant shows up, the jig is up. The imposter is wanted for ques­tion­ing regard­ing Edwardes’s mur­der. “Edwardes” runs off to New York. Knowing only that his ini­tials are J. B., Constance fol­lows him and attempts to ana­lyze him, hop­ing that his dis­play of guilt over Edwardes’s death is no more than a psy­cho­log­i­cal com­plex. She enlists the help of her men­tor, and J. B. describes his dream.

Salvador Dalí cre­ated the dream sequence for the film, and in it Dalí, Freud and Hitchcock are fused into an amaz­ing col­li­sion of cul­tural influences.

Dr. E. Fuller Torrey sug­gests that Freud became pop­u­lar in America because of his the­o­ries sur­round­ing sex­u­al­ity. In an essay in The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, he writes that “Freud was viewed as a sex­ual lib­er­a­tor, the com­mand­ing gen­eral who put the forces of celibacy and puri­tanism to rout.”

Dalí and the Surrealists were inspired by Freud, as were many film­mak­ers in the 1940s. Whether this inspi­ra­tion comes from Freud’s ideas on sex or his use of sym­bol­ism in dream analy­sis or a com­bi­na­tion thereof is a topic for another time, but it’s inter­est­ing to think about when look­ing at Spellbound. Dalí often ties sex­u­al­ity to decay in his art­work, but in Spellbound love and sex­ual attrac­tion are used as a basis for salvation.

Constance uses Freud to heal J. B., and it’s done with clas­sic Hitchcockian sus­pense and sym­bol­ism. Dalí’s dream sequence adds another layer that makes Spellbound a won­der­ful blend of art and psychology.