How we cite our quotes: All quotations are from Spellbound.
Quote #4
BRULOV: I explained to the policeman that if Edwardes took along with him on a vacation a paranoid patient, he was a bigger fool than I ever knew he was. It is the same as playing with a loaded gun.
Brulov unhesitatingly declares mentally ill people to be dangerous—even mentally ill people he has never met, much less diagnosed. In reality, the vast majority of mentally ill people are not particularly dangerous, while sane people can do lots of bad things. But obviously it's a lot more suspenseful to present Ballantyne as potentially dangerous than it would be to just say, oh, yeah, he's not going to hurt anyone.
Quote #5
BALLANTYNE: That Freud stuff's a bunch of hooey.
BRULOV: Oh, you are a fine one to talk! You have a guilt complex and amnesia and you don't know if you are coming or going from somewhere, but Freud is hooey! This you know! Hmph! Wiseguy.
A lot of Freud really is hooey, at least in terms of treating mental illness. Most doctors today don't use Freud's theories to treat their patients. In fact, Brulov here is committing a classic ad hominem fallacy; he dismisses what Ballantyne says because of who Ballantyne is (an amnesiac) rather than considering the comment on its own merits. We've mentioned that Brulov is kind of a jerk, right? (Though, to be fair, he's pretty funny.)
Quote #6
BALLANTYNE: But there weren't any walls, just a lot of curtains with eyes painted on them. A man was walking around with a large pair of scissors, cutting all the drapes in half.
Ballantyne's loopy Salvador Dali-inspired dream has the weirdest imagery—and the most insane storyline—in the film It's not a hallucination though; it's just a dream. Everybody has dreams—which means everyone goes a little insane in their sleep.
Spellbound for the most part presents madness and sanity as separate and distinct. But Freud believed that everyone had neuroses and mental problems—essentially, for Freud, everyone was mentally ill to some degree. The dream sequence, therefore, is a reminder that it's not quite so easy to shut madness in, when everybody goes a little mad every night.