Freud

Watched all eight episodes of the Austrian-German Freud (2020), described by its creators as historical fiction. The series features Sigmund Freud's early struggles to cure patients by means of hypnosis, a method of unlocking the door to the unconscious in order to liberate the ego from psychological ailments. It is as exquisite as the USA's Genius: Picasso while being anti-biographical. In this production, Freud is a Sherlock Holmes who solves several, intertwined, crimes not by means of his gray cells but by means of explorations into the minds and hearts of his fellow characters. 

The series has multiple premises due to its multiple subplots, everything set against the backdrop of Hungarian militants seeking freedom from German rule and discrimination practiced against Jews. It tends to be confusing, however, due to the writers' hodgepodge of crime, the occult, mythology, sex, and romance, peppered with scenes based on Freud's actual biographies and theories, such as the pleasure-pain principle, the Oedipus complex, homosexuality, and penis envy, to mention a few. Details from Freud's real life will also tend to mislead the unwary viewer to accept the series as fact rather than fiction: the scene in which his mother rubs her hands together to produce dirt to convince her son that everyone goes back to dust, his addiction to cocaine, and his obsession with exotic statuette-fetishes. As such, only psychology majors can completely appreciate the series. On top of everything, Robert Finster is too handsome to play Sigmund Freud, as Robert Downey was a total deconstruction of Doyle's description of Sherlock Holmes. 

There is a lot of delicious but sometimes bizarre nudity. Inevitably, Episode 8 contains necessary multiple endings, the weakest being that of Alfred Kiss, which came across as a vampire, horror movie ending. While the creators came up with a well-polished job of illustrating Freud' s psychoanalytical theories using clever parallelisms, the reality still remains that not everything in this world has a Freudian explanation. As though to make that clear, the fantasy scenes were more Jungian than they were Freudian!