Culture | New film

Method in the madness

A searching look at what caused the split between Freud and Jung

Jung and in love

PSYCHOANALYSIS, as practised by Carl Jung and his mentor, Sigmund Freud, in Zurich and Vienna in the early 1900s came to be known as “a dangerous method”. It is a good title for this absorbing film, written by Christopher Hampton and based on John Kerr's 1994 book about Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein, which explores the role Spielrein (Keira Knightley) played in the two men's lives. An 18-year-old Russian patient of Jung (Michael Fassbender), who cured her psychotic hysteria in 1904, Spielrein later became an analyst and an inspiration both to Jung and to Freud (Viggo Mortensen). According to Mr Kerr, she also became Jung's lover, a breach of professional ethics that contributed to the discord between the two analysts and their acrimonious parting of ways in 1913.

Directed by David Cronenberg, “A Dangerous Method” contains no exploding heads to remind viewers of his 1981 film, “Scanners”. But Spielrein certainly comes close to blowing up in the opening sequence, in which Ms Knightley gives a harrowing portrayal of the symptoms of hysteria that turns her face into a twisted, jut-jawed mask of terror at the sadistic paternal abuse that is the cause of the character's illness. Extrapolating a bit, the film-makers speculate that the doctor-patient affair was spiced up by re-enactments of those paternal spankings.

As “A Dangerous Method” threads its way through the labyrinth of words that these brilliant, questioning people use to probe, seduce and wound one another, it deftly dramatises the intellectual differences that brought about the Freud-Jung split without actually giving either man the last word. Portraying Freud as a witty patriarch, the film seems to side with him against his stiff-necked protégé. Freudians will conclude that Jung is wallowing in mysticism to hide from the truth and that his sexual urges almost destroyed his marriage and his patient's sanity. It is a tribute to both men's ideas, and the creativity of the film-makers, that Jungians (and Cronenbergians) are equally free to see the myth-haunted Swiss psychoanalyst as a tragic incarnation of Orpheus, who should never have looked back at Eurydice when rescuing her from the underworld of Hades.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Method in the madness"

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