REVIEW: Jung and Freud, heal yourselves

Psychoanalysis has been so influential, at least in part, because two of its creators, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, were so devilishly gifted at creating memes. Many of their technical terms are brilliant at arguing for their own validity. Consider inferiority complex. Set aside what is actually meant by that. Everyone, upon hearing it, instinctively thinks they know what it means, and what’s more they know someone they can instantly apply it to. The “talking cure” and the analyst’s couch are likewise embedded in our mythology, even though modern psychoanalysis has more complex thoughts about them. I confess that the more-earnest devotees of the approach (Woody Allen and Howard Stern have daily sessions) may benefit at least partly because it keeps them out of trouble. Whatever we think, there is no doubt that psychoanalysis is now firmly embedded in our consciousness.It provides us with a way of thinking about ourselves.  

Its validity is beside the point. As a term of reference it is real.  

David Cronenberg’s absorbing “A Dangerous Method” involves a few years during which the entire field was largely invented (if I may say so) in the association of Freud (Viggo Mortensen), Jung (Michael Fassbender), and a woman named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), who began as their patient and became their colleague.  

Using a dialogue-heavy approach that’s unusual for him, Cronenberg’s film is skilled at the way it weaves theory with the inner lives of its characters. We are learning, yet never feel we’re being taught. Freud and Jung seem to be learning at the same time.  

Viggo Mortensen’s performance is masterful in the way it shows Freud as a contained, analytical logician, whose conclusions seem prudent if you grant him his premises. Perhaps his incessant smoking is an indicator of compulsions that his speech, usually calm, conceals.  

Jung is more unpredictable, and Michael Fassbender shows him as a man whose theories permit him a good deal of improvisation.  

“A Dangerous Method” opens in 1904 with the arrival at Jung’s Zurich clinic of Sabina Spielrein, manic and desperate, struggling with two attendants who try to constrain her. Jung is apparently her last resort. Using Freud’s theories and method, Jung has success in calming her, untwisting her, and eventually liberating an intelligent inner woman.  

At that time Jung knew Freud only through his writings, but not long after he traveled to Vienna to meet the great man himself, and their conversations are a model of clarity and sanity; the screenplay by Christopher Hampton is based on his play “The Talking Cure” and the book “A Most Dangerous Method,” by John Kerr.  

As Sabina heals and blossoms, an attraction grows between her and Jung, despite Jung’s love for his wife, Emma (Sarah Gadon). They begin an affair. When Freud  later takes Sabina as a patient, he learns of the affair, and uses it as a weapon in his ideological struggle with Jung.  

What the movie suggests is that psychoanalysis as a scientific system may have been harmed by the struggle between these two founders, and that Sabina Spielrein, indeed, may have arrived at more useful conclusions than the two dueling male approaches.  

It would help to know something about psychoanalysis, or at least be curious to learn, before seeing this film. The movie’s poster suggests a romantic triangle, which is true only in a theoretical sense. The poster design is the popular “giant heads” format, with Knightly most prominent in front and center, and the smaller Mortensen and Fassbender flanking her. If Jung and Freud could have seen this poster, what uneasy dreams it might have inspired.