"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.