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A Dangerous Method
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Like most
writers, I’m often asked ‘What are you working on?’ A few years ago, when I was
writing a book on Sigmund Freud’s art collection, I was surprised by the
antagonism many women expressed when I mentioned my research. ‘Eeeew!’ Noses wrinkled in disgust. ‘I don’t like Freud. I
like Jung!’ The reaction derived,
presumably, from Freud’s unfortunate theories about penis envy and female
castration while Jung – not just his theories but the man himself – seemed to be regarded as ‘feminist’,
spiritual, good. I felt forced to
reply that while Freud (to the best of my knowledge) had never slept with his
female patients, Jung certainly did – a situation that caused ongoing distress
for Emma, his wife. The women were horrified, disbelieving, leading the
conversation away from Freud (and his art collection) to a debate about whether
or not Jung was a nice guy.
David
Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (2011
- he has since released Cosmopolis,
2012) explores an unedifying episode in the history of psychoanalysis – Jung’s
affair with his former patient Sabina Spielrein and, when Spielrein appealed to
Freud to censure Jung and to assuage her distress when Jung abandoned her,
Freud’s refusal to believe her version of events. The film’s counterpointing
narrative is the bromance between Freud and Jung and their ensuing break-up
which rocked the burgeoning psychoanalytic movement. It is based on John Kerr’s
1994 book A Most Dangerous Method and
Christopher Hampton’s 2003 play The
Talking Cure.
Cronenberg
treats Spielrein as a case study to critique the ‘talking cure’ and he
backgrounds the affair with the politics of psychoanalysis which turn out to be
as venal and vengeful as most political stoushes. (It’s worth remembering that
it was not Freud but Bertha Pappenheim, a patient of his colleague Josef
Breuer, who invented the term ‘the talking cure’.) Cronenberg asks Michael
Fassbender (Jung) and Viggo Mortensen (Freud) to underplay their characters so
Spielrein (Keira Knightley) can take up most of the emotional oxygen. In 1904,
nineteen-year-old Spielrein, the daughter of wealthy Russian Jewish parents,
arrived at the Burghölzli sanitorium in
Emma
(Sarah Gadon) has a thankless role. Cronenberg casts her as the opposite to
crazy, sexy, brilliant Sabina. Emma is an impeccable bourgeoise, as pretty as a
china doll, who, constantly and miserably pregnant, longs to produce a male
offspring to please her husband. Jung seems baffled by Emma’s need to prove
herself worthy of him/this task. What does this woman want? Cronenberg signals Jung’s ignorance in a scene where Jung asks Emma
to do a word association test. Her hesitancy at words such as ‘marriage’ and ‘divorce’ leads Sabina
– in her first job as Jung’s assistant and a junior shrink – to opine that Emma
is anxious that her husband will be unfaithful. Jung seems surprised, choosing
to respond to Sabina’s insights, and deflect his own feelings, with a
compliment: ‘You’ve a flair for this.’
It’s an
appalling untruth about Emma. If Cronenberg had represented Emma as the woman
she was – smart and confident, an intellectual on a par with her husband who
became an analyst – it would destroy the (quite conservative) balance between
male and female he seeks to establish. Sex, for Emma, is about procreation, not
recreation, so of course Jung would
get the hots for Sabina. She’s wild! She’s fascinating! She’s panting with
lust! Emma couldn’t possibly be any good in bed – so quiet, so fastidious, so dull! Emma isn’t going to ask to be tied up and have her
bum smacked now, is she?
Cronenberg
underscores the scenario of inevitability by pitting Jung against two devils who lure him with the temptations of the flesh: the first is
Spielrein, the other is Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel). Gross, a doctor and a
psychoanalyst, was confined at the Burghölzli and treated by Jung for cocaine
addiction. The contest goes some
distance towards ameliorating Jung’s irresponsible behaviour as a doctor who
had an affair with a disturbed and vulnerable young woman. Jung is twice
seduced: first by Spielrein and then by Gross’s libertine philosophy. Gross is
clearly insane and it seems unlikely that anyone in their right mind would take
seriously his gospel of unethical self-indulgence. Cronenberg pokes fun at Jung
who, perhaps due to his mystical temperament, appears innocent, a virgin about
passion and the dark excesses of desire. Spielrein has much to teach Jung on
that score but while she is seen half-naked and in a sexual frenzy, Jung keeps
his clothes on, even when making love to her. Sex, for Cronenberg, is assigned
to the spectacle of the feminine.
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Like
Spielrein, Freud was obsessed with Jung and entertained unrealistic
expectations of him. Initially, Jung was Freud’s able lieutenant, ready to go
into battle to defend the cause of psychoanalysis and Freud himself. To Freud, Jung was a dream come true, telling
him, ‘I formally adopted you as eldest son and anointed you ... as my successor
and crown prince.’ (1) Vividly intelligent with a commanding presence, Jung had
the added advantages of the academic recognition denied to Freud, and of being Aryan. Freud
confided to Karl Abraham that Jung guaranteed psychoanalysis would not become
‘a Jewish national affair.’ (2) At the Burghölzli, Jung’s workload was
gruelling and he was accustomed to eighteen-hour days. When he explained to
Freud that he couldn’t answer Freud’s stream of letters because he had ‘a mass
of other things to attend to’, he wasn’t exaggerating. (3) But Freud was so
besotted with his big, blue-eyed Teuton, it was a
plea, both for time and space, that he largely ignored.
Warning
bells were sounded early in the friendship. When Freud wrote that ‘many who are
sensible in other respects find it possible to combine spiritualism with
reason’, he defined Jung’s attitude. (4) Another sticking point was that Jung
could never quite accept – and Freud could not accept that Jung could never
quite accept – sex as the foundation of the neuroses, the driving force of
personality and the basis of civilisation. The bromance ended in tears. Freud,
in a series of clumsy attempts to impress his authority on Jung, alienated and
infuriated his young colleague, placing Jung under such pressure he cracked.
Cronenberg’s
decision to make Fassbender and Mortensen underplay their roles creates a
disadvantage for the denouement. Fassbender’s Jung and Mortensen’s Freud are such tightly stitched-up gentleman they can’t unleash
their furies. (In some scenes, Mortenesen is so close-lipped it’s difficult to
hear what he’s saying.) Jung’s famous letter to Freud, an essay in bilious
invective, is read by Fassbender like a mild rebuke towards his fallen father
figure. The letter marked the beginning of a massive breakdown when Jung quit
the Burghölzli and, for several years, occupied himself by sitting on the
lake-shore near his home silently playing with the toys he had made himself.
But it proved a catharsis as, in that period, Jung
developed the key ideas which are synonymous with him: the collective
unconscious, the archetype, the anima and animus. Freud, the tougher of the two
despite his emotional dependency, retreated into his cohort of faithful
followers and satisfied himself with denouncing Jung in print.
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1. Freud
to Jung, 16 April 1909. The Freud-Jung
Letters, The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and
C J Jung. Edited William McGuire. Translated Ralph
Manheim and RFC
3. The Freud-Jung Letters, 79 J, p. 133. 4. Sigmund Freud, Dreams and
Delusions in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’, (1907 [1906]). The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited and translated by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London:
Hogarth Press, 1953-1974; Vintage, London, 2001), vol. IX, p. 71.
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Sex or spirit? The distance has been erased and
we have recalibrated psychoanalysis as closer to art than science. These days,
Jung tends to be identified with the New Age and Freud with the academy. Jung is regarded with suspicion by some hard-nosed intellectuals
while Freud, the self-confessed ‘godless Jew’, is dismissed as soulless and
unimaginative by some believers. (5) Though the end-credits present Sabina’s life as
triumphant, it is Cronenberg’s wish fulfillment and, like most happy endings,
not quite true. Her marriage was unsatisfactory. She had success training
analysts in
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5. Freud to Oskar Pfister, October 9,
1918. Quoted in Peter Gay, A Godless Jew, Freud,
Atheism and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1987), p. VII.
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from Issue 2: Devils |
© Janine Burke March 2012. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |