Sigmund Freud is the subject of three major films or TV series, the first of which was 1962's Freud: The Secret Passion starring Montgomery Clift as Freud, directed by John Huston from a revision of a script by an uncredited Jean-Paul Sartre. The film is focused on Freud's early life from 1885 to 1890 and combines multiple case studies of Freud into single ones, and multiple friends of his into single characters.[269]
In 1984, the BBC produced the six-episode mini-series Freud: the Life of a Dream starring David Suchet.[270]
The stage play The Talking Cure and subsequent film A Dangerous Method focus on the conflict between Freud and Carl Jung. Both are written by Christopher Hampton and are partly based on the nonfiction book A Most Dangerous Method by John Kerr. Viggo Mortensen plays Freud and Michael Fassbender plays Jung.[271]
More fanciful employments of Freud in fiction are The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer, which centers on an encounter between Freud and the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, with a main part of the plot seeing Freud helping Holmes overcome his cocaine addiction.[272] The 2020 Austrian-German series Freud involves a young Freud solving murder mysteries.[273] The series has been criticized for having Freud be helped by a medium with real paranormal powers, when in reality Freud was quite skeptical of the paranormal.[274][275] Freud also helps to solve a murder case in the 2006 novel The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld.[276]
Mark St. Germain's 2009 play Freud's Last Session imagines a meeting between C. S. Lewis, aged 40, and Freud, aged 83, at Freud's house in Hampstead, London, in 1939, as the Second World War is about to break out. The play is focused on the two men discussing religion and whether it should be seen as a sign of neurosis.[277] The play is inspired by the 2003 nonfiction book The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Armand Nicholi which also inspired a four-part PBS series.[278][279]
Freud is employed to more comic effect in the 1983 film Lovesick in which Alec Guinness plays Freud's ghost who gives love advice to a modern psychiatrist played by Dudley Moore.[280] Freud is also presented in a comedic light in the 1989 film, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Portrayed by Rod Loomis, Freud is one of several historical figures recruited by the film's time-traveling lead characters to assist them in passing their high school history class presentation.[281]
