The film begins with a voice-over narration by director John Huston, describing the story as "Freud's descent into a region almost as black as hell itself--man's unconscious--and how he let in the light."

With his mother's encouragement, Freud goes to Paris to study the condition with Dr. Jean-Marin Charcot, who has made some advances with the help of hypnosis but still has not been able to fully cure his patients.

Returning to Vienna, Freud marries Martha Bernays and sets up practice, trying Charcot's techniques to cure different patients of their neuroses.

He is especially upset and driven to unsettling dreams, however, when one patient, Carl von Schlosser (David McCallum), stabs his soldier father's uniform and fondles the female mannequin beneath it.

[1] When it becomes apparent that Cecily is sexually attracted to Breuer, he leaves her treatment to Freud, who eventually foregoes hypnotism and has her recount her dreams and to free-associate words, memories, and ideas.

At a lecture to other doctors and psychologists, Freud's ideas are received with derision, but a few people defend his willingness to break out of old habits and prejudices in search of the truth.

In 1958, John Huston decided to make a film about the life of the young Sigmund Freud, and asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a summary of a projected scenario.

Sartre submitted a synopsis of 95 pages, which was accepted, but later completed a finished script that, if filmed, would have amounted to a running time of five hours, which Huston considered far too long.

[1] The film heavily compresses events, cases and acquaintances early in Freud's career, spanning from his work at the Vienna General Hospital under Theodor Meynert during the mid-1880s, through his research into hysteria and his seduction theory along with Breuer, up until his development of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex around the turn of the century that became the basis for his fundamental Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, first published in 1905.

The character of Cecily Körtner is based upon a number of early patients of Freud's, most heavily drawing on the Anna O. case but also Dora and others.

This mise en scéne gave it a tantalizing German expressionist look and made the patient's repressions come to life on the screen, telling more about the subject matter than the narrative's wearisome simplistic didactic tone.Montgomery Clift delivers a superb, yet troubled and complex interpretation that benefits from remarkable direction.

Probably too risky for its day, the film was a surprise sleeper hit: theatres in the mid-west had to ditch scheduled features when audience demand quadrupled.. such was the morbidity of the times.

An overlooked gem even to this day, this is an unfortunate loss since Freud: The Secret Passion is a remarkable film.Huston's problem was to render an intellectual quest, one that wants to be told in words, in images suited to film.

As for Montgomery Clift, he portrays an anguished, somber and fragile Freud, closer to the James Dean of Rebel without a Cause than to the mummified figure imposed by the official historians of psychoanalysis: a character, in any event, more Sartrean than Jonesian.

[15] The mostly dissonant, atonal score to Freud was one of the early works by composer Jerry Goldsmith with an electronic music sequence by Henk Badings.