Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound came out in 1945 during the height of the psychoanalytic movement in the United States and throughout the world. Psychoanalysis, the process of uncovering though talk-therapy and dream analysis repressed memories in order to liberate a constricted and therefore neurotic or psychotic consciousness, gained credibility in the early decades of the 20th century. After WWI, the theories of Sigmund Freud and his followers spread quickly and psychoanalytic practitioners and schools opened in most major European and American cities. During the 1930s and early 1940s, many prominent psychoanalysts (most of whom were Jewish) fled Europe for the United States, making the U.S. the center of the psychoanalytic movement. The movement dominated American psychology in the 1940s and throughout the 1950s. Already in the early years of the 20th century, artists, writers and filmmakers became interested in the ideas of psychoanalysis, foremost the notion that the repression of basic instincts leads to neurotic or psychotic expression. Bohemian thinkers saw around themselves a bourgeois, Victorian society that teemed with “repression.” These thinkers and artists considered individual and social pathologies – everything from perverse sexual behavior to murder and war – as expressions of repressed instincts. The dream sequence in Hitchcock’s "Spellbound," designed by the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali captures this Freudian sensibility. Dreams in the Freudian system were great puzzles, the solutions to which could unlock hidden mysteries in the human mind. Such an unlocking of a mystery is at the heart of the film. The dream scene in this case plays the key role of leading the film to its denouement.

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