The pipe-smoking psychiatrist, whose office portrait of Sigmund Freud has the uncanny habit of appearing to perch on his shoulder, must defend his patient against his colleagues anxious to free up beds. Virginia is followed through a series of increasing difficulties, some of which are caused by the less enlightened doctors, until she reaches a desperate low--the turning point: she imagines herself and the other women patients in a snake pit. With the added help of electroshock, her recovery begins; it is complete when she is freed of transference and able to say that she is no longer in love with her doctor.

This pro-psychiatry film is cited as one of the first Hollywood movies to give serious attention to the subject of mental illness. Its confidence in psychiatric diagnoses and treatments, especially the combination of psychoanalysis and physical therapies, reflects the increasing optimism of psychiatry in the early 1950s. "Snake Pit" was nominated for six Oscars--winning only one (for Best Sound); one year later, the Nobel prize was awarded to Egaz Moniz for his development of cerebral arteriography and frontal lobotomy.