The film "Doctor Edward" is a suspense film directed by Hitchcock, telling the director of the mental hospital is about to retire, the new director who will replace him is the young and promising Dr. Edward, the beautiful female doctor Peterson in the hospital loves him, but in the process of getting along, he finds that he is not the real Dr. Edward, and he is identified by Dr. Edward's secretary as Edward's murderer, facing the confused identity of the lover, Peterson firmly believes that he is not a murderer. However, the old dean used psychoanalysis to confirm that Edward was the real murderer, and under the pursuit of the police, Peterson led his lover to the teacher's home to carry out a wonderful psychological analysis, and the shadow of his childhood and the truth of Dr. Edward's death gradually surfaced.
"Doctor Edward" is a masterpiece of psychoanalytic films, the film uses a surreal postmodern audiovisual language style to express the dreams formed by the externalization of the desires and fears hidden in the hearts of Freudian people, trying to express the film's portrayal of associations, dreams and other psychology, and favoring film narrative elements such as memory, forgetting, imagination, and subconscious.
In the movie "Doctor Edward", the most wonderful fragment is the analysis of the dreams of the fake Doctor Edward presented in the professor's home, in his dream, the work of the classic surrealist painting master Dalí appears, countless pairs of eyes appear in his dream, he uses scissors to cut a hole in the canvas full of eyes, this scene was directed by Luis Buñuel in 1928, Salvador Dali starred in the fantasy short film "An Andalus Dog" The picture in which a man unbelievably cuts the heroine's eyes is extremely similar, and the same is a terrifying shot of cutting the eyes in a very frightening and terrifying way, the creation of this film is inspired by a dream of Buñuel, he told Dalí about this dream, so there is a non-realistic shot in the film "An Andalus Dog", the film is irrational, the development of events does not follow normal logic, full of shocking pictures, the film has a strong impact on the audiovisual senses of the viewer, Meaningless stitching and irrational exposition made this film have a great impact at that time, and the active exploration of film aesthetics also made this film an unavoidable topic in the history of cinema.
In "Doctor Edward", the surrealist style of Dalí is also continued, and the strong personal expressions such as the severed eyes, deformed staircases, and characters with blurred facial features allow the audience to identify the author of the image at a glance. Dalí gives a more fantastic color to the abstract dream, the dream is an effective bridge between the most primitive desires in the deepest part of the individual's heart and the real existence, through the dream of the false identity of Dr. Edward can be revealed, the shadow of childhood and the mystery of the tendency to identify crimes are also solved one by one, the analysis of the dream and the correspondence of reality is the key to decoding reality, the characters, objects, events, details, backgrounds, etc. in the dream are subtly related to reality, and the dream is another reality.
Fake Edward's forgetting is an instinctive profit-seeking and harm-avoidance mentality, selectively forgetting the shadow events of childhood, while the subconscious mind retains some key information, so in Edward's memory, the traces of snowmobile slippage are preserved, and edward as an adult experiences a similar scene again, and childhood mistakes cause Edward to confuse the past with the present, produce self-misjudgment, and attribute the death of the real Edward to himself, just as in childhood he thought that the accidental death of his brother was caused by himself. He was convinced of the illusion that he was the murderer and was terrified of the scratches on the white background panel.
In Freud's theory of personality structure, he believes that personality is composed of three parts: the self, the ego, and the superego, the original self is the most primitive part of the personality structure, and the composition of the original self is the most basic needs of human beings, including material satisfaction and emotional catharsis, and the personality attribute represented by the fake Dr. Edward in the film "Dr. Edward" is the part of the original self in Freud's personality composition, he selectively forgets the unpleasant experiences of the past, and only retains the relatively easy memory that is in line with personal interests. At the scene of Dr. Edward's murder, JB, as an eyewitness, instead of retaining the memories associated with the murder, fell off a cliff after Dr. Edward was shot, and he took office in place of Dr. Edward, maintaining the illusion that Dr. Edward was still alive, a choice that he did not need to think about instinctively, and the individual's need for happiness was immediately satisfied.
Compared with JB Peterson, who can be understood as an expression of self, on the one hand, as a doctor, she needs to be responsible for the patient, solve the patient's mental problems, and try to bring the patient something that can be called hope; JB is also one of her patients; on the other hand, JB is not an ordinary patient, Peterson's feelings for him have obviously surpassed the ordinary doctor-patient relationship, but a lover relationship outside the doctor-patient relationship, and the love for him is also a manifestation of Peterson's original desire. Peterson in dealing with this problem, always maintain calm and rational, the ego in the real environment by the ego differentiation, the various needs of the ego in reality by the identity, social environment and other factors can not be immediately realized, the ego on the ego impulse has a buffering and regulating function, and Dr. Peterson is the best example of the self, she expresses her feelings while restraining and introverted, the identity of the doctor and the identity of the lover can coexist in harmony.
The existence of the guru is undoubtedly the perfect expression of the superego in personality, which has two important parts, one is the lofty ideal of the self, and the other is to prescribe that one's behavior is free from the limitations of making mistakes. As a mentor, he always stays out of the matter, psychoanalytic therapy as his lifelong pursuit and goal, and for its continuous specialization and proximity, even in the face of his own students, he can still put forward pertinent opinions in line with the effective opinion of the pursuit of self-ideals, even if the students seem to be impossible to do, but at the same time, he is not a standing cold-eyed non-participation in any event, when he judges that JB may be the real murderer, and the student's behavior will undoubtedly bring unnecessary errors and trouble, he chooses to intervene actively, Find out the real facts and avoid becoming an accomplice to the criminals or a strange old man who obstructs the police.
In the theoretical system of film, film psychology and montage long shots together constitute an important film theory of the classic period, and Hitchcock's "Doctor Edward", as the earliest batch of psychoanalytic films, perfectly integrates Freud's psychoanalytic theory with film art, Dalí's surrealist dream broadens the performance space of the film, and Hitchcock's suspense laying out and Freud's dream are perfectly combined to achieve the classic psychoanalytic film "Dr. Edward".