A New Series About A Young Crime-Fighting Sigmund Freud Is Coming to Netflix

A recent­ly announced, as-yet-uncast Net­flix series cen­ter­ing on the exploits of young, crime­fight­ing Sig­mund Freud, track­ing a ser­i­al killer in 19th-cen­tu­ry Vien­na, has been caus­ing great excite­ment.

Though as Chelsea Stein­er points out in the Mary Sue, Freud’s equa­tion of cli­toral orgasms with sex­u­al imma­tu­ri­ty and men­tal ill­ness could put a damper on any sex scene in which a female char­ac­ter takes an active role.

Per­haps the youth­ful Father of Psy­chol­o­gy won’t be hook­ing up with his female sidekick—a medi­um (always so help­ful in cas­es involv­ing ser­i­al killers!)

Per­haps instead the real love inter­est will be the intrigu­ing­ly named Kiss, a testy war vet­er­an cop. As Freud wrote in a 1935 let­ter:

Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty is assured­ly no advan­tage, but it is noth­ing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degra­da­tion; it can­not be clas­si­fied as an ill­ness; we con­sid­er it to be a vari­a­tion of the sex­u­al func­tion, pro­duced by a cer­tain arrest of sex­u­al devel­op­ment. Many high­ly respectable indi­vid­u­als of ancient and mod­ern times have been homo­sex­u­als, sev­er­al of the great­est men among them. (Pla­to, Michelan­ge­lo, Leonar­do da Vin­ci, etc). It is a great injus­tice to per­se­cute homo­sex­u­al­i­ty as a crime –and a cru­el­ty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Have­lock Ellis.

The eight-part Ger­man-lan­guage series will be direct­ed by a Mar­vin Kren, who seems, in the trans­lat­ed press release, as if he might be equal to the task.

I more or less grew up under­neath Sig­mund Freud’s orig­i­nal sofa, mean­ing: in the same dis­trict in Vien­na where he had his office. The dif­fer­ence: When I was born the world already prof­it­ed from Sig­mund Freud’s ground­break­ing dis­cov­er­ies for almost a cen­tu­ry. We, the mod­ern human beings, live in post-Freudi­an times. It is very appeal­ing and chal­leng­ing for me to imag­ine a world in this series in which the ‘self’ was just a blind spot on the map of cog­ni­tion, a world that hasn’t seen Sig­mund Freud yet. I would like to emerge with ‘Freud’ into Vienna’s dark alleys before the turn of the cen­tu­ry, to dis­cov­er the reflec­tion of the labyrinth of the human soul inspir­ing his life’s work. Abysmal, dubi­ous and dan­ger­ous!

The series will debut on Aus­tri­an tele­vi­sion. Net­flix will con­trol inter­na­tion­al stream­ing rights. Pro­duc­tion is due to begin this fall.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sig­mund Freud, Father of Psy­cho­analy­sis, Intro­duced in a Mon­ty Python-Style Ani­ma­tion

Sig­mund Freud Speaks: The Only Known Record­ing of His Voice, 1938

Down­load Sig­mund Freud’s Great Works as Free eBooks & Free Audio Books: A Dig­i­tal Cel­e­bra­tion on His 160th Birth­day

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.