Secrets and Keys: Psychoanalysis, Modernism, and Film in the Curious Cases of Musil's Törless and Pabst's Geheimnisse Einer Seele

Abstract

This essay is concerned with the particular form of curiosity that emerges in the first decades of the twentieth century in the network of relations between psychoanalysis, film, and Modernist writing. In its opening, theoretical section, it considers how Freud constructs curiosity for his project, applying a Benjaminian focus to show how the allegorical forms that that project takes raise questions that go beyond psychoanalysis to more general regimes of knowledge production and consumption. This framework is applied first to a literary text with a cinematographic disposition, Robert Musil's Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906), and then to the programmatic psychoanalytic film, G. W. Pabst's Geheimnisse einer Seele (1926). In both cases, access to the secrets of the soul via an allegorical key is shown to be blocked, with curiosity left open at the end.