My wife Jeanne Jordan and I are best known for films like Troublesome Creek and So Much So Fast, documentary sagas in which character and relationships shape a family’s destiny.

Seduction Theory started with documentary interviews about my father, a Freudian analyst who practiced from the 1950s to 2003. But the footage couldn’t capture what I was after and at Jeannie’s urging I reconceived the film as a drama. Films tend to treat psychiatry either with great seriousness or as something zany. I wanted to approach it as part of life. Seduction Theory is first a film about a family, one in which psychology, conflicted motives and hidden meanings are always in play.

The Father in Seduction Theory isn’t merely a shrink, he’s a Freudian. In the 21st century, Freud can seem like a dusty artifact or a punchline in a Woody Allen film. But Freud’s insights are infused into literature, film and our everyday lives. Most of us employ his ideas about symbolism, verbal slips, hidden motives, projection, etc., without even knowing his role in defining them. His view that the mind is divided into id, ego and superego can’t be proven scientifically, but it still serves as a useful metaphor. Growing up in the 1960s with a father who trained at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the problem was that Freudian theory wasn’t seen as useful metaphor but as holy writ. My father’s patients and many of his friends saw him a purveyor of timeless insights into the soul. His pronouncements and prescriptions — backed by that training and the prominence of Freud in the zeitgeist — carried a kind of weight that my mother, for one, found impossible to push back against, despite how outrageous or misguided some of that advice seems now.

There’s a scene in the film in which the Kid tells us about the moment when Freud abandoned his Seduction Theory — in which women’s accounts of childhood sexual abuse were taken seriously — and he suddenly decided their accounts were just fantasy. The doctor held the power to declare what’s fact and what’s fiction. In Seduction Theory, I wanted to vest some of that power in the Kid and explore how fiction at times can be more truthful than fact.

Seduction Theory is a short, and has the structure of a short story. But we think of it as a proof-of-concept for a dark comedy series that explores this family along a longer timeline, through a time of huge changes within the family, the community and American culture.