Friday, January 25, 2013

"A Dangerous Method": Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung Come Apart


A Dangerous Method" is a 2012 Film by the daring Canadian film director David Cronenberg, most famous for his films "The Fly", "Scanners" and first-rate modern film noir feature, "A History of Violence" about a former hit man trying to hide out in a small Midwestern town and build a new life until his old "colleagues" show up...
This film is  180 degrees from any of those other films---it is a dramatization (based on two plays) of the pioneer psychoanalysts: the Austrian Jew Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson) his would-be disciple, the Swiss-Protestant, Carl Gustav Jung (Michael Fassbinder) and a brilliant young Russian woman Sabina Spirlrein (played by Keira Knightley) who is both a mentally disturbed  woman and a intellectual and potential scientific analyst herself. Knightley's performance here is terrific; her bouts with mental illness are truly terrifying and at the same time you feel they are made worse by how well she knows all too well herself just how much potential she has to grow if her illness can be abated.      
The movie works well as drama and you need not bring more than a basic reading of the subject of the human ego versus the darker impulses of humankind to understand  the stakes at hand.  It is a sometimes sexually explicit but not graphic by modern standards.  The drama also comes from the tension between Jung as a professional physician at a Swiss hospital and his realization that his patient/lover Sabina is the love of his life but also capable of destroying both his scientific standing and his domestic happiness.  Like all good human stories, this one is complex enough to remind us  that men and women are more complex than what you can put down in a textbook.  I found the film very intriguing and I think anyone interested in these two giants delving and grasping the rudiments of a  scientific method of understanding human behavior and development  will too.   

8 comments:

  1. Thanks for the preview Doug, it sounds and looks like a fascinating film. Sabina is the archetypal femme fatale, portrayed as Jung's anima....she is an interesting person to say the least. The tension between the egos of both Freud and Jung with regard to this women who was a living testament to the psychoanalytic clinical method, must have been verging on explosive. That obviously was what was so 'dangerous' about it I think... Thanks for heads up on this Doug, another one to watch out for.

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    1. Sabina as Jung's Anima is a key component, AA.

      Sabina as patient, lover of one man and first-rate psychoanalyst is the backbone of the story of how Freud and Jung both came closer and came apart. It adds the drama that a joint biography I read of the two giants of science, and their ultimate irreversible rift, needed for a mainstream audience.
      I hope you'll get a chance to rent it and give your own assessment.

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  2. Sorry about the above deletion Doug ....bloody typo tsk

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    1. AA you must stop stressing over the typos......haha, that coming from me who reads and re-reads and edits her posts over and over...

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    2. No problem AA. I always liked the edit feature on comments in Multiply. Now that it's not available here, I find I'm the most typo-prone comment maker on the boards!

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  3. Doug, again, your reviews always make me want to go find the movie and watch it. This one sounds like it is right up my alley of interest. I think my son would like it too. He majored in psychology...... I think he did that to analyze his crazy mama lol

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    1. lol! All children analyze parents sooner or later, although the diagnosis they come up with is probably more lenient as they get older and see what life throws at the average parent/adult.

      I'm guessing your son would get a lot out of this film because it doesn't cut corners on the psycho-analytic part of the "talking cure" and other foundation of the science. I found myself trying to remember my college psychiatry classes and the more recent random readings on the subject. It is a very thoughtful but not overly clinical film.

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    2. Thanks by the way. I like doing reviews but I hate giving away too much.

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