Freudianism became particularly influential in the 1940s. It furnished both a popular explanation for how nations like Germany could “go mad” and a therapeutic technique that might help troubled people and traumatized veterans. It’s not surprising, then, that books like Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites’s The Movies: A Psychological Study (1950) would hinge their case for recurring character types on the Oedipus complex and other syndromes.
