Mr. Skin Mr. Skin

Besides being one of the greatest minds the Western World has ever produced and a thinker whose influence on the way we think of ourselves rivals that of Plato, Kant, and Descartes, Sigmund Freud has also provided the inspiration for a number of movies featuring female funbags, fanny, and furburgerage. In honor of the Great Man's 151st birthday, I will present a list of three movies that make use of Freud's ideas about repression, transference, and Oedipal desire and also show tits.

Taboo (1981)

The X-rated classic Taboo stars porn legend Kay Parker as hot-to-trot mother and housewife Barbara Scott, a sexually frustrated woman who gives in to incestuous desire with her teenaged son Paul (Mike Ranger) fulfilling the Oedipal fantasies of millions of boys without any of the nasty patricide and gouging of one's own eyes added by Aeschylus.

Frenzy (1972)

With movies like Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock did more than anyone else to popularize the ideas of Freud and his philosphers (including French analyst Jacques Lacan) leading philosopher Slavoj Žižek to write a book called Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan... But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock in 1993. But it wasn't until 1972 that Hitchcock gave us a Freudian nip slip in his most violent (and next to last) film Frenzy. Thirty minutes into the movie, we see the boobs of a body double (Freud often speaks of sublimated and misdirected desire).

Silence of the Lambs (1991)

From very early on, Psychoanalysis has been likened to detective work. Lacan used Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Purloined Letter" to explain the linguistic structure of The Unconscious, another analyst, Julia Kristeva has herself written several murder mysteries, and contemporary French analyst and public intellectual has proposed an alternate solution to one of the Agatha Christie's most famous mysteries in his book Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery. The Silence of the Lambs is Hollywood's most famous presentation both of psychiatrist as detective and the suppressed eroticism of the analyst-analysand relationship. Jodie Foster doesn't get naked, but we do see a naked corpse on an operating table. Freud would call this an example of Death Drive.