ABSTRACT
Cinema, psychoanalysis, and Zionism emerged from the same historical moment. During the year in which the fi rst public fi lm screenings occurred, Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer published Studien über Hysterie (1895), in which they introduced the technique of psychoanalysis, and Theodor Herzl began writing Der Judenstaat (1896), the founding text of political Zionism. Film theorists have long noted the interrelation between the advent of fi lm and the beginnings of psychoanalysis. Both are often articulated in terms of images, dreams, and wishes; seem to unveil a realm beyond optical consciousness; engage with phenomena that have always already occurred; and call for interpretation and textual production. Furthermore, scholars such as Daniel Boyarin have argued that the discourses associated with Freud and Herzl, both of whom lived on Vienna’s Berggasse in the mid-1890s, were responses to the hystericization of the male Jew at the fi n de siècle. According to Boyarin’s analysis, Freud developed a heteronormative Oedipal model and displaced the mise en scène of hysteria onto women, and Herzl embraced masculinist, autochthonous, and nationalist nineteenth-century discourses in his conceptualization of a modern Jewish nation-state.2
