A fascinating early attempt to illustrate Freudian psychoanalysis on film, Secrets of a Soul follows the case history of a man (Werner Krauss) driven into a state of terror by a dream in which he attempts to stab his wife. The film illustrates elements of his fantasies and memories as they are revealed in interviews with an analyst. Though Pabst is already the "cool observer" of his later films, Secrets is filled with strikingly beautiful images and bravura film technique: knives, doors, stairs, and ladders are presented in double and triple-exposure, as examples of the contents of this afflicted mind. Written under the supervision of three students of Freud, but repudiated by the good doctor himself, the film was criticized for its simplistic conclusions. But more recently it has been interpreted as implicitly critical of psychoanalysis: thanks to the film technique itself, as scholar Anne Friedberg has noted, "the spectator...is positioned as a more astute psychoanalyst than the fictional surrogate."