'Freud's Last Session' - UK cinema release.

 

Anthony Hopkins is a fine actor but I'm surprised that they've chosen to make a film about Sigmund Freud. 'Freud Last Session' will be released in UK cinemas on 14 June. The film is based on an imaginary conversation between Freud, played by Anthony Hopkins, and the author C.S. Lewis, played by Matthew Goode, about the existence of God and Freud's relationship with his lesbian daughter, Anna.

It seems likely that Lewis and Freud never met and that this fictional conversation stems from the imagination and pen of the playwright, Mark St. Germain, who staged a play of the same name in 2009 and also wrote the film script. 

Since the 1970s, Freud's scientific reputation has been in free fall. Today, many see Freud as a quack and a charlatan. Frederick Crews 600-page book, 'Freud: The Making of an Illusion' published in 2017, portrays a man who engaged in fraudulent science, falsified case histories and never cured anyone. Freud even promoted cocaine as a miracle drug that was capable of curing a range of diseases.

The American psychologist, Albert Ellis, famously said that "Freud was full of horseshit." Apparently, Freud had once told a patient called Horace Frink, who was an American psychiatrist, that his misery stemmed from his inability to recognise that he was a homosexual. Freud hinted that a solution to his problem lay in making a large financial contribution to Freud's work.