HOPING FOR HISTORY IN FUTURE

Psychoanalysis and film making are connected in more than one way. They were born at approximately the same time and are based on dreams and the unconscious. There is hardly a person who has not tried to decipher either their own dreams or a movie. It is not surprising, then, that there is a whole field in modern psychology dedicated to film psychoanalysis.

Munich-based Prof Dr Andreas Hamburger is one of Europe's leading specialists on the subject. His 2024 book Film Psychoanalysis: Relational Approaches to Film Interpretation is a definitive study on the topic. Together with his wife and film analyst, Dr Vivian Pramataroff-Hamburger, he introduced it to Bulgaria in the 2010s. Today, the country has a growing group of professionals working in this field.

Prof Hamburger also works closely with colleagues from the Balkans on social trauma in the aftermath of violent historical events. Their latest book on the subject, Screening the Scars. The Cinematic (In-)Visibility of Social Trauma (2024), connects film psychoanalysis and social trauma.

Prof Hamburger's connection to Bulgaria started as a personal one. His wife, Vivian, is Bulgarian. Today the couple spends a significant part of their time in Bulgaria and has turned their homes in Sofia and the Strandzha into self-styled salons for a growing group of Bulgarian friends. He visited Bulgaria for the first time in 2001.

What did you make of Bulgaria during this trip, in 2001?

Vivian and I travelled from Varna on a one-week trip through the country's most important cultural highlights. I was deeply impressed by the intensity of many of the sites, especially those churches that were built into the ground, like in Arbanasi. A small church in Tryavna fascinated me. In the background, illuminated by the dim light of one of the low windows, was a table with a flowered tablecloth. On it were a hundred glasses with the remains of candles and a passport photo: the dead are still here, the dead who are still known. It became more earthly in the Valley of Roses, where we visited a reopened rose oil factory – an encounter with the new hope of a country. And in Koprivshtitsa, the hopes of the past.

Then we finally arrived in Sofia. I was initially shocked by the suburbs that lined the motorway. But then the city centre gave me a much friendlier welcome. The golden domes of the Alexandr Nevskiy Cathedral were impressive, but the Icon Museum below confronted me again with the intensity that I had found in Arbanasi and Tryavna. My favourite church in the capital, however, remains St Sofia. With its bare brickwork, it radiates a unique dignity. I've always been more interested in the unadorned than the polished, in the small rather than the monumental. I sat in it for a long time and let the space work its magic on me. I should mention one thing: the people are more important than buildings and monuments. I have made many friends in over twenty years.

What do you think of Bulgaria now? What has changed for the better and for the worse?

That is a complex question. In two decades in Bulgaria I have experienced many ups and downs, hopes and disappointments. And some of my naive first impressions have been revised. But what I see above all is that decent work is starting to be rewarding again, the middle class is growing and is not letting its self-confidence be taken away. There is certainly still a lot to do. But these people are doing it.

What should a foreigner know if they want to establish a good professional and personal rapport with a Bulgarian?

Choosing a partner, just like choosing friends, is not a game of strategy. The spark ignites when it fits. Perhaps a little tip: Respect helps more than a quick answer. If you don't understand something straight away, you can always ask. I have learned so much from my friends.

As the person who introduced film psychoanalysis to Bulgaria, can you sum up what makes it exciting and important?

Psychoanalysis is not only a method of treating mental illness. From the very beginning, it was also a cultural theory. Its contribution to the interpretation of works of art is based on this. Art is something like the dream of a society. It is well known that analysts interpret dreams. However, with art it's the other way round: we don't analyse the film, but the film analyses us, its audience. As analysts, we show how it does this.

In your opinion, is there such a thing as a shared Bulgarian psyche?

At the beginning, when you get to know a country, you generalise your impressions and think you know what "the" Italians, "the" Germans or "the" Bulgarians are like. The better you get to know them, the more this certainty disappears and you see different people. Like every nation, Bulgaria has its own formative history, which often has to do with social trauma and which determines certain reflexes in the emotional and political landscape. In Bulgaria, it was a history that for centuries offered little opportunity for the development of a genuine and specific concept of freedom.

You are also a member of a research network that deals with Communist history. As a psychoanalyst, how can you describe the connection between Bulgarians and their Communist past? As a trauma? An obsession? A repression? Or something else?

I know from German history that overcoming a dictatorship is a long and difficult process of coming to terms with the past, which requires historical research, testimony and the personal willingness of many people to acknowledge the past. As a psychoanalyst, I know how much people try to repress shameful or traumatic memories, and how helpful it is to find a safe place, someone who will listen without judgement, to make this repressed history accessible again, not to run away from it. I'm sticking to my own experience as a German and I don't want to apply that to Bulgaria. It is up to the Bulgarians themselves to uncover the excluded parts of their history and to look it in the face.