From Freud’s early childhood, where his family encounters aggressive anti-Semitism, to his student years in Vienna, where he studies the reproductive faculties of eels, the film probes deeply into the ways in which Freud’s own experiences and unconscious processes may have inspired his influential and persistently controversial ideas. An atmosphere of intimate conversation, created by Corti’s use of closed, richly textured spaces and precise narrative interruptions, allows for a portrait of Dr. Freud that is both provocative and refreshingly human.