Fantasy and Dream work in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Essay -- Cabinet

Fantasy and Dream work in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari The silent expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari exposes psychological guilt and insanity through the main character's fantasies and delusions. This character, Francis, brings the viewer into a nightmarish world through his story-telling. He recounts the story of the mad Dr. Caligari and the somnambulist Cesare who is under his control. The doctor's arrival in Francis' hometown results in a string of murders, the death of his best friend Alan and the kidnapping of his beloved fiancà ©e Jane. Francis tells this story as if it were true, but in the end he is revealed as a patient in a mental hospital. The film does not confirm whether Francis' story is reality, but Freudian theory suggests that this story is a wish fulfillment. Francis' neurotic mind created and mistook this fantasy for reality in order to displace the guilt over his friend's death by means of dream work and displacing his guilt onto the somnambulist Cesare. Neurosis is characterized by a retreat into ones imagination and alienation from reality. According to Freudian theory, this is also typified by believing a fantasy to be the truth. "Neurotics turn away from reality because they find it unbearable; the most extreme type of this turning away from reality is shown by certain cases of hallucinatory psychosis which seek to deny the particular event that occasioned the outbreak of their insanity" (Freud, 301). In this passage, Freud describes the psychological techniques that a neurotic mind uses in order to cope with a traumatic event. Instead of coming to terms with their trauma, the mind will alter the events and shape them around a delusion in order to produce a more pleasing conc... ...ing fantasy. In addition, Dr. Caligari and Cesare are not real people; they are fragments of Francis' psyche and serve the purpose of objects onto which the blame is displaced. The filmÕs ambiguous ending leaves the validity of Francis' story unknown because his illness is not explicitly confirmed. However, Freudian theory clarifies this uncertainty by showing that Francis has fantasized the entire story to satisfy his guilty mind. Bibliography The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Dir. Robert Wiene. Perf. Werner Krauss, Friedrich Feher, and Condrad Veidt. Decla-Bioscop AD, 1920. Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. & Norton. ---. Writings on Art and Literature. Ed. Niel Harz. Janowitz, Hans, and Mayer, Carl. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. (1920). http://www.cs.nyu.edu/kandathi/scr/caligari.txt