Analyze This

"I don't analyze my characters in my films, nor do I try and analyze myself. I don't want to know. I hate psychoanalysis. It doesn't do good to anyone. Like the Spanish Inquisition didn't do any good to anyone."
—Werner Herzog, Newsday, August 7, 2005

"I think that psychoanalysis is one of the great evils of civilization, even worse than the Spanish Inquisition. At least the Inquisition was about keeping something together. Analysis is only about taking a person apart. I would rather die than see an analyst."
—Werner Herzog, The New Yorker, April 24, 2006

"I have a metaphor: If you illuminate your house with strong lights to the very last corner, the house becomes uninhabitable. And it's the same thing if you try to illuminate a human being to the last crevices of his or her soul—these human beings become uninhabitable. I do not want to deal with it. It's a little bit like—of the same magnitude as—the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition didn't do much good, and it was a similar quest. It was a quest to search and to illuminate the last little corner and crevice of your faith—scrutinizing all the depth of your faith, whether you were in the doctrine of faith or not. It didn't do much good. So I think psychoanalysis is a mistake of the same magnitude."
—Werner Herzog, Stop Smiling, Issue 25, 2006

Comments

[Andrew]

Wow, thanks for posting this. I just got through watching Burden of Dreams recently. Now Herzog makes much more sense to me... I think.

[Sean]

Although I have not undergone the Spanish Inquisition, nor have I experienced death, I will have to respectfully disagree with Herzog on this point - I prefer psychoanalysis to both of them.

[Todd]

At least Nabakov is funny when degrading psychoanalysis.

I haven't seen too much of Herzog's work, but after the two-fer of the great recent New Yorker article about his upcoming film with Christian Bale and his appearance on the Henry Rollins Show (IFC makes the worst freakin' shows - the Rollins show is an abomination in so many ways that I obsessively tape it) I want to see more and I will see more (starting I think with Aguirre).

I like Herzog's voice a lot, whether he is threatening Kinski with death or re-enacting Dirty Harry, and I think he should seriously consider voice-over work in a cartoon. Or maybe he should be a the guest lecturer of "defense against the black arts" in the next Harry Potter film.

[Brendan]

It's a mixed metaphor--the Spanish Inquisition mortified the body, not the soul. Werner should catch up on his Foucault...