"Freud" (1984) TV mini-series

User Rating:

5.7/10   

Director:

Moira Armstrong

Writer:

Carey Harrison (writer)

Release Date:

14 September 1984 (UK)

Genre:

Biography | Drama

Plot:

The life and times of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis.

Plot Keywords:

TV Mini-Series

Awards:

1 win

Cast

Alison Key	...	Anna Freud
Suzanne Bertish	...	Minna Bernays
Michael Pennington	...	Carl Jung
Michael Kitchen	...	Ernst Von Fleischel-Marxow
Dinsdale Landen
Anton Lesser	...	Wilhelm Fleiss
David Swift	...	Jacob Vreuer
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Peter Birrel	...	Adler
Helen Bourne	...	Martha Bernays
Raymond Brody	...	Klemperor
Jack Chissick	...	Oppenheim
Jeremy Clyne	...	Wolfman
Claire Davenport	...	Teresa
Howard Goorney	...	Jacob Freud
David Hatton	...	Stekel
Eliza Hunt	...	Amalie Freud
Peter Jeffrey	...	Federn
Martin Lawton	...	Meissi
Leon Lissek	...	Wittels
Miriam Margolyes	...	Baroness
Clive Merrison	...	Tausk
Kerry Shale	...	Rank
Colette Stevenson	...	Dancer
David Suchet	...	Dr. Sigmund Freud
Hugh Thomas	...	Ferenczi

Runtime:

UK:60 min (6 episodes)

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Certification:

Netherlands:AL

Company:

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)

The Cigar as Delivery System

I haven't seen this since it's release but it made such an impression that it's lasted 20 years. It's superlative TV fare. Of the performers I remember David Suchet as Freud best. We follow him from his professional beginnings to his awful speechless death of oral cancer. The series moves at a slow pace and needs some attention and will profit from some interest in intellectual history on the part of the viewer.

But that's just fine. The pace gives us ample time to follow the ins and outs of Freud's relationship with his colleagues, his wife, and his girl friend. (A comfortable menage a trois, there, involving his wife's sister.) And of course we have time to see the not-so-slow deterioration in his friendships, beginning with Adler, and his insane friendship with Fliess, the doctor who believed that the nose was the seat of the soul. Man, was he hung up on noses. He blew one or two simple operations on noses and Freud covered for him, but I can't remember if that's in this series. (That Fliess "blew" a couple of surgeries on noses is a kind of, well, a kind of play on words.)

Some new material about Himself (mostly negative) has appeared since this series was put together, but we pretty much get Freud, warts and all, in this series. Freud faints in public (twice) when his disagreements with Jung surface. Jung was also a psychotic, in the literal sense, later in life, but this isn't Jung's story.

If you have the time and interest in much of what passes for our understanding of human nature today, even to the extent that Freud provides a convenient bad example, you shouldn't miss this. Warts or no warts, Freud lay the foundations of our conception of who we are in the 19th century, and is up there in the pantheon alongside Marx and Darwin.