THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK

ECXTACT FROM THE WEBSITE:

http://www.netscape.com/viewstory/2006/10/28/the-psychology-of-alfred-hitchcock/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fneurophilosophy.wordpress.com%2F2006%2F10%2F17%2Fthe-psychology-of-alfred-hitchcock%2F&frame=true

Hitchcock once remarked that “television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.” During much of Hitchcock’s career, Freud’s ideas were dominant, and although Hitchcock was skeptical of psychoanalysis (as he was of other explanations for human behaviour), Freudian concepts and motifs recur in many of his films.

REPRESSION
Repression is one of the Freudian concepts which recurs in Hitchcock’s films. According to Freud, “the essence of repression lies simply in the turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious”. Freud believed that traumatic memories, usually of childhood events, are repressed by the conscious mind; this is a defence mechanism which keeps the ego free of conflict and tension. These memories remain hidden in the subconscious, and manifest themselves in the neuroses and psychoses of the individual, when something induces the momentary retrieval of a repressed memory, triggering a neurotic or psychotic episode. One aim of Freudian psychoanalysis is the retrieval of these repressed memories from the subconscious, in the hope that confronting them will cure the patient’s neuroses.

OEDIPUS COMPLEX
Another concept sometimes employed by Hitchcock is Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex. This derives its name from Oedipus, the character in Greek mythology who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. Freud believed that all children are attracted to their opposite sex parent, and this creates conflict with the parent of the same sex.