We are the stuff, as dreams are made on, and our little life, is rounded with a sleep.

Prospero, The Tempest

Dreams are a biological necessity, a world we enter during sleep and more often than we’d like to admit, when we’re awake. They can be interpreted as our own personal cinema, whether brimming with nonsense or sparks of creative genius. They’re the ultimate expression of personal synesthesia, as we recreate all the human senses and emotions within our psyche. Whether we choose to consult them or not, they serve as a pathway into the unconscious mind, that infinite repository promising many answers yet remaining so elusive.

Analytical psychology and cinema simultaneously came of age at the birth of the twentieth century. While the analysis of dreams developed into a serious pursuit through the work of psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, humankind simultaneously discovered how to capture dreams in moving images. Both fields developed rapidly through the 20^th Century with cinema and the integrated musical becoming the most synesthetic art forms when potently integrating vision, story and music.

In the 1950s and 60s, French film critics studied the works of major directors and formulated the Auteur Theory, emphasizing directors as the primary author of a film. While this oversimplifies the complexity and collaborative necessity of filmmaking, it’s most credible when studying directors with long careers demonstrating common themes and artistic visions. To name a few, we have Christopher Nolan, Wes Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorcese, Steven Spielberg, and the two we’ll focus on in this study, Alfred Hitchcock and Federico Fellini.

Let’s enter into a thought experiment. What if we could extend the Auteur Theory to everyone, elevating the concept of a personal cinema that reflects our own concerns and sensibilities? Could we interpret our own dreams like a film critic, dissecting underlying meanings and themes? And could we apply musical queues, personal leitmotifs that can serve as guideposts through this mental exploration?

While such a journey would be assisted by consultations with psychologists and music therapists (of which my health insurance lends no financial assistance), we can learn a great deal studying film directors and their composers, interpreting their cinema as their personal dreams. We’ll focus in this study on Hitchcock, best aligned with Freudian concepts, and Fellini, a poetic visionary aligned with Jungian models. Can this study assist us in finding these same cinematic techniques in our nocturnal and waking dreams?

First an overview of Freud and Jung, and this is as oversimplified as many French theories, such as which baker invented the Napoleon, but it will assist as an outline. Freud’s focus was on the causes of mental illness and how to cure them. He saw them mainly as the result of childhood traumas and exaggerated fears. These were often suppressed in the unconscious, and if we could bring them to the surface through dream interpretation or other probes, we could eradicate the neuroses they cause.

Jung was a student and collaborator of Freud but broke with him eventually and struck out on his own. In my view, this was mainly because Freud’s approach was too restrictive. Jung recognized the personal unconscious with its repressed memories and impulsive drives just as Freud did. He went further however in conceiving of the collective unconscious, common blueprints within the psyche that all humanity shares, exemplified in symbols, archetypes, fables, mythologies, and enlightenment systems such as alchemy, astronomy/astrology, Tarot, the Kabballah, among others. A better understanding of these can not only cure neuroses but also bring about great wisdom and superintelligence.

Whereas Freud concentrated on the lower chakras, Jung explored higher with great determination. This is not to say one focus is better than the other, as our success in life is measured on how we manage all.

To launch this thought experiment, we’ll work with one film from each director that I believe strongly reflects their sensibilities; Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) and Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963). As music is a critical element in the synesthetic force of these films, let’s note the scores of Dimitri Tiomkin and Nino Rota. Auteur caliber directors know how music enhances the emotions and mindset of the characters and sets the rhythm of the story. Hitchcock collaborated on four films with Tiomkin and Fellini’s core work is intrinsically linked with the music of Rota.

THE MOTHER ARCHETYPE

The concept of the mother is both highly personal and universal. In mythology, the mother archetype is linked with the concept of Mother Nature, the nurturer, protector, the caregiver, and our personal mothers reflect these attributes, especially in a child’s formative years. But this position of great influence enables the mother to be possessive, devouring and destructive, especially in an unhealthy environment such as a warming planet or marred in the irrational fear of losing a son.

In Strangers on a Train, Bruno Antony meets Guy Haines randomly on the trip from Washington to New York, wearing a tie bearing the image of lobster claws, given to him by his mother.

Bruno/Mother - Strangers on a Train

We learn early that he fosters a tremendous hate for his father and an almost erotic love for his mother, a manifestation of Freud’s Oedipus Complex. There are numerous examples of unhealthy mother-son relationships throughout Hitchcock’s work, such as in Notorious, The Birds and most explicitly in Psycho. According to Donald Spoto’s biography The Dark Side of Genius, Hitchcock experienced tremendous guilt and longing when he left his mother during the Blitzkrieg of London to conquer Hollywood in the late 1930s.

In 8 ½, a famous filmmaker struggles to conceive his next project, under tremendous pressure from his producers. His self-doubt and fear of being revealed as a despicable fraud drives him into a state of introspection, streaming through memories, dreams and fantasies.

Asa Nisi Masa - 8 1/2

Here, a psychic has brought forth a word from his subconscious, leading to an idyllic childhood memory of motherhood as nurturing and caring. His cousin tells him to utter the magic phrase ASA NISI MASA which will enable extraordinary vision and reveal hidden treasure. This is a childlike play on the word Anima, which in Jungian psychology refers to the repressed female characteristics in the male psyche that the male projects onto the women in his life; mother, wife, mistress, muse and monstrous prostitute, often driving embellishment, distortion and fantasy; What is the treasure Guido hopes to find? Perhaps he wants to force attributes of this exaggerated, caring mother into all of his relationships with women, undoubtedly stifling his development and contributing to the crisis in his life.

THE CARNIVAL

The carnival is both a physical space and an adolescent archetype of the deep mind, a setting of awe, escape and fantasy, where repressed wishes for thrills, love, and power are fulfilled. This is all fine when we experience these thrills without the danger, but what happens when we cross the line and the carnival turns deadly?

Bruno Antony has learnt that Guy Haines wants to divorce his wife. She refuses, pregnant with another man’s baby. Guy physically demonstrates his anger and overtly states that he could strangle her, but naturally he harbors the self-control and common sense to keep this wish suppressed. Bruno however is just a stranger he met on the train, capable of doing this deed without suspicion, expecting Guy to murder his father in exchange.

The Carnival - Strangers on a Train

The carnival becomes the perfect setting for Bruno’s murder of Guy’s wife, piercing the partition between the fantasy and the real, the dreaming and the awakened state, encapsulated and refracted in glasses that turn strangling hands into lobster claws.

Clairvoyant Reading Minds - 8 1/2

Fellini’s works are full of allusions to the circus and magic. Here, dinner guests are entertained, or perhaps ambushed, by a clairvoyant and her brash assistant attempting to read their minds. But just as some in the crowd revolt against such introspection, we’re often reluctant to focus on our dreams or confront our most difficult challenges.

TRANSFERENCE AND PROJECTION

Within any social relationship, transference and projection of emotions and ideas occur among people, organizations, forms of media, even objects. They can temporarily alleviate anxiety by for example blaming others for our own shortcomings or devaluing objects we can’t possess, but we should identify our most powerful transferences and projections before they become destructive.

Bruno has murdered Guy’s wife, fulfilling Guy’s evil, repressed wish. But Guy refuses to reciprocate by murdering Bruno’s father, since after all he’s going into politics. Earlier Guy had accidently left his cigarette lighter with Bruno, and Bruno plans to plant this object in the amusement park to implicate Guy in the murder.

Transference of Guilt - Strangers on a Train

Unfortunately, on the way to the murder scene, the lighter falls into a storm drain while Guy attempts to win his tennis match and race to the amusement park to stop Bruno. The lighter, now deep in the dark, vile gutter, is back in the subconscious, the dormant state where we’re all capable of evil. Who’s murder is it, Bruno’s or Guy’s? This ambiguity, this transference of guilt, is manifested in the tennis ball going back and forth between the opponents, while Bruno struggles to bring the lighter back into the realm of consciousness.

When we dream, the free flow of the subconscious may enable connections that are obscured in the waking mind. Often, the mysteries behind transferences and projections are revealed.

Revealing Projections in a Dream - 8 1/2

After a tryst with his mistress, Guido dreams of visiting his father in a cemetery where his mother’s present cleaning his sarcophagus. The dream is brimming with projections of Guido’s guilt and anxieties. We surmise that Guido has neglected his parents during life, and they appear here to manifest his deficiencies. His mother cries out “How many tears, son, how many tears?” His father complains about the eternal resting place that Guido’s provided. Then his producer and long-time assistant stop by to give their disappointing assessment of the son’s performance to his father, with Guido seemingly still yearning for his father’s approval.

Upon the father leaving, Guido’s mother engulfs him in a passionate kiss, then turns into his wife, Luisa. Perhaps if Guido can better understand his parent’s disappointment, he can build better relationships in his work and his marriage. Or he can forget the dream completely and remain with his mistress, moving further into neurosis.

THE CIRCLE AS A SYMBOL OF THE PSYCHE

While we may perceive of life as linear, the predominant structure is cyclical and spherical, as seen in the seasons, the rotations of the planets, the Fibonacci Sequence that underlines patterns in biology and mathematics, and the endless cycles of birth, death and rebirth. In the Freudian realm, circles can represent traps from which we must be freed in order to conquer neuroses. Jung in contrast was fascinated by mandalas, circular designs that have repeating shapes and patterns radiating symmetrically from the center, representing interconnectedness and wholeness. All cultures feature mandalas, from Tibetan sand mandalas to the rose windows of Christian churches.

Carousel Finale - Strangers on a Train

Guy pursues Bruno in the amusement park, accosting him on the Carousel now spinning wildly out of control thanks to a trigger-happy policeman. The manically spinning carousel is the manifestation of a psychotic mind. The most wild and dangerous behaviors rise to the surface with no possibility of reason or logic to intervene. The only solution is the destruction of the circle and the vicious cycle. Bruno dies and Guy’s innocence of the real murder is validated, but is he truly innocent? In realizing his wish without suffering the ultimate cost, we can hope that Guy will act more responsibly in the future, enlightened by his journey into a personal hell.

If an obliterated circle is the end result of a psychotic mind, the creation of a holistic circle in motion would represent the opposite. Guido reaches the end of his journey, abandoning his film project in failure and disgrace. But instead of wallowing in this disaster, he decides to embrace his confusion.

Carousel Finale - 8 1/2

Without a film to direct, Guido directs the various aspects of his current relationships, memories, dreams and fantasies. They tumble down from the set of his dead film and wander around the grounds (at 35 seconds into the clip, we see a juxtaposition of the Cardinal and the prostitute, a reconciliation of opposites). Confined within a circus ring, they join hands together on top of the circle. After bringing Guido’s mistress safely to the front, the clairvoyant’s assistant is back to lead them in a tarantella dance around the circle. Rejected by his mother, Guido joins the circle with his wife. For what may only be a brief moment, Guido has cultivated his psyche into a coherent whole of white purity.

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