Werner Herzog on psychoanalysis (and the 20th century)

Coincidental to my reading and review of Bill Watterson’s The Mysteries last weekend, today I ran across this passage on psychoanalysis from filmmaker Werner Herzog’s recent memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All*:

“I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become ‘uninhabitable.’ I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.”

As in Watterson’s book, Herzog suggests here that the drive to illuminate and resolve—and, inevitably, to control—can only end in catastrophe. Food for thought.

Last year I read Herzog’s short novel The Twilight World and greatly enjoyed it. I haven’t delved deep into his filmography, which I keep meaning to correct, but his movie Invincible has proven uniquely haunting to me ever since I first watched it twenty years ago. I recommend it.

*German title: Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle. The German-language audiobook is the only version currently available through my library. Might be a good opportunity to scrub some of the rust off my German.