Sigmund Freud Did Not Go On Supernatural Mystery-Solving Adventures Like He Did In Freud
NetflixRobert Finster as a young Sigmund Freud.
In 2020, Netflix released the eight-part series Freud, a historical thriller about the famed neurologist Sigmund Freud — except in this version, he’s a cocaine-addicted witch hunter who uses hypnosis to solve mysteries.
So, right off the bat, almost everything about this show is historically wrong.
Per a review from The Guardian, the show begins with a young Freud anxiously practicing hypnotism in the hopes of proving his worth at his academy and doing cocaine, presumably to calm himself down.
But midway through the episode, any pretense of historical accuracy is thrown out the window when two inspectors throw the mutilated body of a sex worker onto Freud’s desk. Freud uses this as an opportunity to look further into his idea of an embodied, active unconscious — and offers to help the inspectors figure out who killed the unfortunate victim.
Later on, the fictionalized Sigmund Freud attends a seance where a woman named Fleur Salome “suffers a bad trip into the alternate realm, one haunted by a blood-stained demon.” She is also evidently susceptible to Freud’s hypnotism, so she becomes a patient of his — and his lover.
A couple of episodes later, it is revealed that the criminal Freud is hunting is “Countess Sophia, whose hypnotic powers dwarf Freud’s and rely on a psychosexual combination of touch and verbal manipulation.”
According to a different review of the same series from the Daily Dot, “The show bears so little resemblance to reality that comparing the fictional Sigmund Freud to the real one feels like a fool’s errand.”
If there is any historical accuracy to be found in the show, it is that the real-life Freud did have an addiction to cocaine, according to PBS.
But did he possess magical hypnotic powers and go up against a sexually-charged villainess in a battle for the fate of Vienna? No.
