Secrets of a Soul

The scientist Martin Fellmann starts to be afraid of knives. As the fear grows, something quite different appears inside it: the urge to kill his wife. He cannot tell anyone, and the dreams he has at night become steadily more tangled and more threatening. In the end he sits down opposite a psychoanalyst, who offers to find out where the fear comes from. G. W. Pabst's film is counted among the first major productions to take psychoanalysis directly as its subject. The producers asked for Freud's support; Freud refused, believing cinema could not carry the subtleties of psychoanalysis. Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs, from his close circle, worked as advisers. The dream sequences use every optical trick of the period, and they are still the most striking thing in the film. Werner Krauss is in the lead.