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

trance and Dream drop dead in The locker of Dr. Caligari The silent expressionist charter The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari exposes psychological guilt and insanity through the main characters fantasies and lyings. This character, Francis, brings the peach into a nightmarish world through his tosh-telling. He recounts the story of the worried Dr. Caligari and the somnambulist Cesare who is under his control. The doctors arrival in Francis hometown results in a take up of murders, the death of his best friend Alan and the kidnapping of his beloved fiance 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 verify whether Francis story is reality, but Freudian surmise suggests that this story is a wishing fulfillment. Francis neurotic mind created and mistook this fantasy for reality in order to derange the guilt over his friends death by means of dream work and displacing his guilt onto the s omnambulist Cesare. Neurosis is characterized by a retreat into ones inclination 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 bitter 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 eruption 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 damage 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 exercise the purpose of objects onto which the blame is displaced. The films 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 vicious 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