ABSTRACT
Florian von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others, which won an Oscar for best foreign film in 2005, is a detailed examination of the obsession of the former East German secret police (STASI) with spying on their fellow citizens, relying on a network of 200,000 informers. A similar dynamic pattern to that of The Lives of Others is contained in 1984, George Orwell's classic novel, where STASI repressive tactics are replicated by the omnipresence of Big Brother, the Thought Police, and the telescreen to enforce abject submission to the state of Oceania among its populace. In The Lives of Others, the pathological intrusiveness of the STASI in East Germany into the privacy of their countrymen in order to uncover political deviance can be traced to unresolved issues derived from primal scene trauma superimposed upon critical deficits in the oral psychosexual phase of development.
