Anna Freud’s Blank Screen: Home Movies and Psychoanalysis

This article undertakes a close reading of home movies of the Freud family with the goal of examining questions that lie at the historical origin of psychoanalysis itself. These questions pertain to the porous boundaries in Freud’s work between empirical research, clinical observation, and therapeutic practice. As a kind of archive, as memory work, home movies can be used to elucidate psychoanalytic theory as well as its application to the practice of psychoanalysis. Given that Freud’s daughter Anna was involved in the postproduction of the movies, the films effectively map out the conditions of possibility for a delayed revision of her father’s tendentious theories. Hence, this article seeks to deepen our understanding not only of a specific set of home movies, and the symbolic operations of amateur film, but also of a few key concepts of psychoanalytic theory: narcissism, sublimation, and transference.