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Movie Takes
A Dangerous Method
Isn’t it better simply to live with our neuroses?
Here’s what I liked about David Cronenberg’s new movie, A Dangerous Method, loosely based on the early history of psychoanalysis — as filtered through the work of psychologist cum historian John Kerr (A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein) and playwright Christopher Hampton (The Talking Cure) — in spite of its having reduced that history to little more than a celebrity soap opera. He sets out four different theories about the job of what used to be called the “alienist” or, as P.G. Wodehouse would put it, “the loony doctor” which are still held today. The watchword of Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) is the injunction: “Whatever you do, give up any idea of trying to cure them.” Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), Freud’s younger disciple, fitfully accepts this view of his profession but is too much the enthusiast to accept it for long: “It’s no good showing the patient his illness squatting like a toad in the corner.… We must teach him to reinvent himself,” he says. Jung also has some sympathy for the view of another renegade Freudian, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), who anticipates some of the radical psychiatry of the 1960s by commanding: “Never repress anything” — and by living his own life by that creed with predictably disastrous results.
Like many a lesser man, Jung allows himself to be persuaded by Gross’s creed only to the extent that he gives himself permission thereby to do something which, without it, he knows very well to be wrong. That is, he indulges his lust for a young patient, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), whom he has cured of hysteria and whose love-by-transference for himself is liberally peppered with masochistic urges left over from the paternal abuse that caused her mental illness in the first place. When Jung tells her that his love-making with his wife is “tender” she replies: “With me I want you to be ferocious; I want you to punish me.” And, reader, he does! Foreplay for them appears to consist of his belting her with, er, a belt while she moans with apparently orgasmic pleasure. Is he just politely obliging her kinky desires? Or does the man who says more than once that there are no coincidences find an answering sadism in himself to complement her masochism? That seems by far the more likely explanation, yet the film appears to have no other interest in the kinky side of Dr. Jung. A curious omission.
Miss Spielrein goes on to become a psychoanalyst herself and a pupil of Dr. Freud after Jung guiltily rejects her. Hers is the fourth psychoanalytic path, as she tells a surprised Freud that, in her view, sex is not motivated by gratification of the ego but by the desire for self-annihilation. “True sexuality demands the destruction of the ego,” she says, which is “the opposite to what Freud proposes.” But the film doesn’t take a position on this difference either. The salient moment of Sabina’s relations with Freud comes when the great man tells her that there was never any future for her in a relationship with Jung and that her dream of a “blond Siegfried” (she and Jung are both enthusiastic Wagnerians) was never going to come true. She should “put no trust in Aryans,” he tells her. “We are Jews, Miss Spielrein, and Jews we shall always remain.” There is, then, a nice dramatic irony in the fact that — as we are informed by a card at the end — she was later to be shot by the Nazis.
By this time, Freud has broken off his once close relations with Jung over the latter’s “mysticism” (as he sees it), which threatens the whole scientific foundation of psychoanalysis. A century later, long after that foundation has been called into question for quite different reasons and psychiatrists have mostly moved on from “the talking cure” to prescribing psychotropic drugs, it’s a little hard to see the point of the Freud-Jung quarrel except as a quasi-Oedipal conflict — O, the irony! — that might provide an operatic plot if only somebody died in it. In place of individual tragedy, Mr. Cronenberg, working from Mr. Hampton’s screenplay, places a Jungian premonition — he accepts him as some kind of clairvoyant, it seems — of the First World War, still a year or so distant at the movie’s end, which was to sweep away Old Europe and the system of civilized repression on which (they say) it was founded.
That seems to me to be a cheap way of borrowing significance for a story that otherwise might seem to lack it. More importantly, it obscures the still vital and still unanswered question of whether we ought to live with our neuroses or to try to cure them. Mr. Cronenberg might argue, as some liberal pacifists do these days, that the war, like all wars, was the product of bottled-up passions which could be released in much less harmful ways by a therapeutic approach. His earlier film with Mr. Mortensen, A History of Violence, seems to me to be based on some such view of the world. If only we could find the root cause of violent or anti-social acts or of mental illness we could prevent them. Maybe they even have the same root cause: repression. The character of Otto Gross tells us that he’s not going to fall for that one, but without some such inevitably facile solution to its problems, the film really has nowhere to go apart from this vaguely portentous ending and a lingering memory of the lovely Miss Knightley in Victorian-style undies being whaled on. Whatever turns you on, I guess.
About the Author
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.
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Ken (Old Texican)| 12.27.11 @ 7:29AM
Ladies and gentlemen,
I refer you to the most famous and brilliant man to ever chair the Freudian department ... The heir to Freud's chair in fact.
Victor Frankl (correctly spelled.)
A layman's overview of his thought is in paperback. "Man's Search For Meaning" check it out at amazon.com reviews
I commend it to each of you
Tina B| 12.27.11 @ 9:03AM
Ken, great comment!
L. Ross| 12.27.11 @ 9:19AM
For those of you who would like to see an intelligent movie based upon the BDSM world, I recommend "Secretary" starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Of course there is always "The Story of O" which holds up suprisingly well.
Seek| 12.27.11 @ 12:27PM
A cult classic from around a decade ago. I've read that Maggie Gyllenhaal since has regretted taking the role, but, hey, that's entertainment.
WRTolkas| 12.27.11 @ 10:19AM
As for me, I'm going home to watch the director's cut of The Great Raid. I let the 6th Ranger Battalion do my psychoanalyticalization.
Happy New Year to all.
Margie| 12.27.11 @ 5:39PM
Freud was a sicko.
And psychiatry is helpful to some degree for those who truly need it, but it CANNOT heal you on the inside.
THAT must come from God Himself.
And Jesus is the Great Physician. He heals us from our sin within, and the Sin is the issue and the cause for ALL of Mankind's ills.
How do I know? The Bible tells me so. Plus, I personally know because He healed me.
"So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed." Jn. 8:36.
Kenneth Olsen | 12.27.11 @ 7:01PM
Cronenberg's "A History of Violence" was such a preposterous death-porn cartoon that it's hard to muster a reason to see his latest effort. Perhaps you can recommend a movie dramatizing how psychiatrists have come to be America's premier drug lords...
POST American| 12.27.11 @ 10:08PM
"DO you realize? --there's been a war
on against culture --the family --identity
--gender --religion, esp. genuine Christian
religion ---against humanity itself for
centuries now."
-------------BEYOND Nuremberg 2012.
--------------------WAY BEYOND. . .
Margie| 12.28.11 @ 1:05AM
"For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
Therefore take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.
Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace; besides all these, taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one.
And take the helmet of Salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God." Eph. 6:12-17.
Eduardo| 12.29.11 @ 2:39PM
Amen, sister. The only thing (excuse me, the only One) that can free us and cure us is the Truth. And we know who He is.
God bless you Margie.
Occam's Tool| 12.28.11 @ 11:02AM
Hey, I fix leaks. I can help your sleep, remove voices, stabilize mood. But the hard work of coming to grips with yourself takes time and work.
Bill| 12.28.11 @ 12:27PM
You can't get better if you don't pay for the therapy.
Eleni Xanthopoulou| 12.30.11 @ 5:13AM
http://www.unsungfilms.com/?p=1546
a great review of this film
Georgia Xanthopoulou | 1.6.12 @ 1:31PM
Based on a stage play which was based, in its turn, on a book by John Kerr, A Dangerous Method is about the relationship a young Carl Jung develops with a troubled patient as well as the beginning and break-up of his friendship with Sigmund Freud. Most importantly, the film concerns itself with the events that probably caused the breakdown he suffered during World War I and the battle within himself as his values as a responsible physician clashed with his carnal desires.
The film starts off quite rough. For those who may be frightened by the beginning of the film, I assure you it gets better. Keira Knightley doesn’t spend the entire time talking and dislocating her jaw like this. Even though she keeps the weird accent -she’s supposedly Russian in the film- and irritating way of acting. Knightley’s character, Sabina, is admitted in the hospital where Jung, portrayed by Michael Fassbender, is working. He starts treating her, in the beginning without her cooperation, but soon she starts to get much better.
His approach to her treatment is ‘the talking cure’, a method Sigmund -Viggo Mortensen- Freud has come up whom, the audience soon finds out, Jung greatly admires. The two men first meet in order to discuss matters of their field as well as Sabina’s case and they grow very fond of each other. Jung goes to become Freud’s protégé, whom he trusts with the treatment of another doctor, Otto Gross, a sex and drug addict. So far so good. This first part of the film establishes Jung as a serious and trustworthy professional, as Sabina is transformed, with his help, from a wild animal to calm, eloquent woman. The admiration between the two great psychiatrists also helps render Jung as a man who takes his profession seriously and who has a lot to offer the field.
And then the tables are turned and the film starts getting interesting. As Sabina starts getting better, it becomes clear that Jung has some soul searching to do as well. In the same way that Sabina gets better not by changing her ways but, simply, by accepting them, Jung must accept some difficult truths about himself as well. In fact, the whole film seems to imply that only by bringing our suppressed urges and desires to the surface we can live happy lives. The two characters who seem to serve as catalysts for Jung’s painful discoveries are Sabina and Otto, Vincent Cassel’s character.
On the one hand, Cassel’s character is portrayed as kind of mad, but also as absolutely free from any notion that society engraves on people about what is right and what is wrong. On the other hand, the more Sabina becomes self-assured and, the more Jung discovers his darker side. Sabina becomes a highly respected academic and psychiatrist and is ultimately respected by both the men of the story. While Jung is afraid of what her tales can cause him, she reacts boldly but respectably, never losing face. Paralleling Sabina’s progress is the downfall, in one way or another, of Freud and Jung. While Freud is seen by everyone as outdated and too old to be able to bring something new to the table of psychoanalysis, Jung has to face his own suppressed desires and accept that they are a part of him. While Freud fades away, becomes more closed-minded about the direction psychoanalysis should go towards, Jung discovers he is closer to Otto than he thought, as his initial views on monogamy and the need to suppress sexual desires in order to be considered morally sound are overturned.
The breakdown of Jung, as well as the notion that Freud’s sex-obsessed theories derived from his own rigid views when it came to sex is, probably, the most compelling aspect of the film. When these character arcs are combined with Sabina’s course-the patient who, by the end, has surpassed both the men in terms of peace of mind and, perhaps, career, what you get is a call for men and women to move forward, express themselves freely, with no prejudice. Most importantly, it‘s about the lesson all characters learn that one needs to truly know themselves and, however difficult, free themselves of unnecessary social constraints in order to have a chance at a meaningful life.