A Dangerous Method [Motion Picture] J

International Journal of Jungian Studies 115 A Dangerous Method [Motion Picture] J. Thomas (Producer) and D. Cronenberg (Director) (2011) UK, Germany, Canada, Switzerland: Sony Picture Classics As the first major Hollywood film to centre on C.G. Jung’s (played by Michael Fassbender) role in the early history of (psycho-) analysis, Cronenberg’s film constitutes a milestone in the portrayal of Jung and his relationship with Freud (Viggo Mortensen). It is also a shift from Cronenberg’s more usual horror genre offering but, to a critic, surprised about Cronenberg’s choice of subject, the director replied: ‘All my life I have been interested in psychology and psychoanalysis’ (Cronenberg & Suchsland, 2011). A Dangerous Method is but one in a long series of literary and dramatic engagements * both on stage and screen * with that key situation of 1908 in the early history of psychoanalysis. The film’s title is taken from the book by the American psychohistorian John Kerr (first published in 1993), who wrote the authoritative account of the events described in the film. Christopher Hampton, writer of the screenplay, had previously tackled the subject himself back in 2002 with his play The Talking Cure. When it premiered in London, I saw it largely as a superficial collage of sensationalist bits and pieces, mostly taken from the Freud/Jung correspondence and presented * albeit with powerful performances by Jodhi May as Spielrein and Ralph Fiennes as Jung * with some rather primitive stage tricks. After London, the play was also staged in Los Angeles (2004), Zu¨rich (2005) and Hamburg (2007). In Cronenberg’s film, Hampton has considerably bettered the account presented in his play. This pivotal moment in the history of psychoanalysis, however, had already been approached several times even before the rediscovery of Spielrein’s importance (Sabina Spielrein played by Keira Knightley in Cronenberg’s version). She became known to a wider public with D.M. Thomas’s (1981) novel The White Hotel, the story of an early psychoanalytic patient who later gets murdered by German soldiers during the Shoah in Russia. Thomas claims not to have been aware of Spielrein’s story and writes in a review of the English language edition of Carotenuto’s book (1984) that first drew attention to Spielrein in the early 1980s: Jung might also have been intrigued, as I was, by the many coincidences which link Sabina Spielrein’s life with that of the fictional patient Lisa Erdman in my novel The White Hotel, though the details of her life were unknown to me when I wrote the novel. (Thomas, 1982) In chronological order there follows in 1989 a play by the Swiss writer Linnard Bardill about Gross’ and Jung’s relationship; 1996 in New York off-Broadway Willy Holtzman’s play Sabina premieres; and two years later in London a play with the same title by Snoo Wilson (1998). Hampton, too, says that he wrote a play with, yet again, the same title, although this was never staged (as cited in Grady, 2011). In 2002, in the year Hampton’s Talking Cure premieres, the story of Jung and Spielrein is the subject of two films, first in Italy (Faenza, 2002), then in Sweden (Russo & Marto´n, 2002). John Carter’s play Where Three Roads Meet * in my eyes by far the best dramatisation (cf. my review in Heuer, 2008) * premieres in 2005, again off- Broadway in New York. In 2006 the German writer Ba¨rbel Reetz publishes her novel Die russische Patientin, a subtle mixing of an autobiographical account and historical 116 Film reviews research. The suffering caused by Jung to the women he later involves in his marriage a` trois is portrayed with great empathy by the Canadian writer Elizabeth Clark-Stern in her 2010 play Out of the Shadows: A Story of Toni Wolff and Emma Jung. (Wolff is briefly mentioned at the very end of Cronenberg’s film. Also an erstwhile patient, she takes Spielrein’s place as Jung’s second wife for decades to come.) Cronenberg’s film is thus only the latest version of a pivotal point in the development of analytical theory and clinical practice: the discovery of countertransference (which ultimately led to intersubjectivity; Heuer, 2011) Á and its uses Á and abuses. Sabina Spielrein was the first patient Jung treated according to the Freudian method, about which at that time he has only read. Four years later, Spielrein has healed sufficiently to be in the process of becoming a physician and psychoanalyst in her own right. It is at this time, in 1908, that * referred by Freud * Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel) enters the same clinic, himself a physician, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst * and anarchist. As a university lecturer he is the first to have introduced psychoanalysis to the university when he lectured on Freud in Graz, Austria, in 1902 * at a time when, according to his memoirs, Jung had not even properly read Freud. The film focuses on Jung’s sexual abuse of Spielrein. He is encouraged in this by the libertine views of Gross and protected by Freud, who is concerned with the reputation of psychoanalysis. In spite of a number of gratuitous voyeuristic aspects in her presentation, due to her presence as an actor, Keira Knightley as Spielrein dominates the film. Vincent Cassel, too, is convincing in his supporting role as Gross, although in keeping with Gross having virtually been purged from the historiography of psychoanalysis, his role is reduced to one of comic relief. Gross, however, was actually important to the development of intersubjectivity in analysis. It started with him when he introduced the anarchist principle of mutuality into Jung’s analysis with him. Enthusiastically, Jung writes about this to Freud in May 1908: I have let everything drop and have spent all my available time, day and night, on Gross, to further his analysis as best as possible [...] Whenever I got stuck, he analysed me. In this way my own psychic health has benefited too. (Freud & Jung, 1974; translation modified) Given the importance of both Spielrein and Gross in the historical development of the concepts of transference/countertransference and intersubjectivity, it is interesting that their portrayal in the film should be conspicuously more lively than the two lead actors. Regardless of considerable praise from the critics, and even a 2012 Golden Globe nomination for Viggo Mortensen, both he and Michael Fassbender pale by comparison: they never seem to truly inhabit their roles to the extent the other two do. The writer Will Self comments on Fassbender’s ‘Jung’: ‘So he’s playing the founding father of psychoanalysis and he clearly doesn’t know anything about it ...just ‘‘mumble mumble’’’ (cited in Armstrong, 2012). A rather important aspect of the film puzzles me, and that is the language or, rather, its pronunciation, which is inconsistent within the narrative world of the film. One component of Knightley’s convincing portrayal of Spielrein is the Russian accent she speaks with (although a Russian colleague assures me that it is by no means authentically Russian) * whilst at least part of Mortensen’s and Fassbender’s.

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