ABSTRACT
Many films on psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts show their viewers are but a parody of what psychoanalysis actually is and what psychoanalysts actually do. A more specific problem is due to certain confusion, especially for Hollywood filmmakers and their audiences, among psychoanalysis, psychology, counselling, and psychiatry; all are perfectly valid therapeutic activities in the field of mental health, but each involve different contexts and practices. Secrets of a Soul presents its viewers with the fictional case of a neurotic chemist, a man who develops a phobia of knives and becomes pathologically jealous and sexually impotent when he hears that a young cousin of his wife is coming to visit them. Over the past century, numerous filmmakers have been influenced in their work by psychoanalytic ideas and have considered them as a fertile ideological background to their stories. There are of course notable exceptions.
