MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

Nowadays there is a lot of ignorance about silent movies. People tend to believe that, in the early 1920s, movies were silent because the actors who played them were dumb. The reality is quite different. Actors of that time could speak, but not in public. It was a very unique case that required the intervention of Sigmund Freud at the request of Jack Warner from the Warner Bros. Ramon Novarro, Mary Pickford, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Rudolph Valentino, Lillian Gish and a long etcetera underwent intensive psychotherapy for three years in a row at Freud’s office in Sacramento, where he had established his medical practice. Freud's diagnosis (equinophobia, or psychological fear of horses) did not satisfy Warner, who asked for his money back.

The patient, on the couch. The analyst behind seated in a chair. PATIENT: Did you meet Freud, Doctor? DOCTOR: Freud? No, I didn’t have the pleasure PATIENT: He must have been a great man DOCTOR: Yes, of course PATIENT: You know? Sometimes, when I'm lying on this couch, I imagine that I am in Freud's consulting room in Vienna DOCTOR: Really? PATIENT: Since you are silent and I can’t see you, I imagine you are Freud. Do you think Freud would have approved that? DOCTOR: What I think is that the time is running out and you're wasting your time talking about Freud PATIENT: So you think talking about Freud is a waste of time, huh? I feel that you don’t like Freud DOCTOR: I'm a Freudian psychoanalyst, so ... PATIENT: That has nothing to do with it. I have a light bulb factory and yet I don’t like Edison at all. Did you know that Edison stole patents? DOCTOR: Well, in this Freud resembled him a little. PATIENT: I beg your pardon? What have you said? DOCTOR: Well,...

To relate the history of hypnosis we have to go back to 1760, when a German doctor settled in Paris observed that the power of attraction of the magnets could be used on the sick without being arrested by the police and put behind bars. The doctor in question was called Mesmer and his discovery was baptized, in a display of inventiveness, with the name of "mesmerism." Mesmer soon saw that magnets could be dispensed with and even the sick, so he began to practice mesmerism on healthy people through the supposed magnetic power of his hands. Practicing wild gesticulations before a mirror to find those that were more spectacular (at that time he exhibited his discovery in theatres full of people who had paid a ticket), one day Mesmer hypnotized himself, staying in a catatonic state for several years until someone casually mentioned in his presence the word "gherkins". This gave him cause for thought and he decided to retire and pass the baton to a French doctor named Ch...

Spending a whole year gawking at the most amazing paranormal phenomena for a Harry Houdini to demonstrate that you have been sold a bill of goods, does not happen without your mental stability being affected to a greater or lesser degree. That is why after the unmasking of a false medium, four of the most prominent members of the Society for Psychical Research -Gurney, Barret, Lodge and Myers- were forced by the SPR Governing Board to attend the consultation of Ernest Jones, one of Sigmund Freud's English outstanding disciples. (Freud refused to treat them personally because he still resented the breakage of a guitar in his head during a séance). Ernest Jones was skeptical not only in relation to paranormal phenomena but also to phenomena as normal as birth (he was convinced that babies were found in a cabbage patch) or death (according to him, only fools died). He resolved to try group therapy with the four members of the SPR. They had to pass a ball made of rags to one another, ...

It was his interest in sleepwalking that put the father of Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud in relation with the Society for Psychical Research. One night Sir William Barrett was walking on the sidewalk after leaving a pub in Soho when he crashed into a man who walked with his eyes closed and arms outstretched. The man woke up at that moment, and a few meters behind him Barret heard a voice grumbling and complaining. It was Freud, who was following one of his patients in order to discover where he went every night after leaving home in a state of somnambulism.   At the advice of Freud, the man’s wife did not dare to stop him. And precisely that night Freud had decided to find out where his patient was going every night. (Later it was discovered that his destination was the same tavern that Barret frequented and that sleepwalking was just a stratagem of the man to escape from home at night without his wife preventing him from doing so.) Barret apologized and offered Freud his card wit...