Jung and Freud make compelling cinema

The birth of psychoanalysis might seem to be a dry subject for a 21st-century movie, but director David Cronenberg and writer Christopher Hampton (adapting his own play The Talking Cure and John Kerr’s 1993 nonfiction book) force us to think again.

Kerr’s full title was A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein, and it makes a fittingly terse synopsis of Cronenberg and Hampton’s movie. It’s also oddly fitting that the central character in this unusual triangle is the only one Kerr found it necessary to identify with her full name.

The teenage Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) is the first one we meet, as she is dragged literally kicking and screaming into an institution in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1904. But this is no madhouse for the shutting away of inconvenient lunatics. It’s a clinic, almost a retreat, and Sabina’s physician is Dr. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Jung is an admirer of the Viennese Sigmund Freud and proposes to try Freud’s ideas in treating Sabina’s diagnosed “hysteria.”

Jung’s “talking cure” makes real progress with Sabina; gradually her strangled ravings and tortured physical contortions subside and the young woman’s innate intelligence, perception and sensitivity emerge. Jung, at first simply reserved and watchful, becomes more comfortable and relaxed around Sabina.

Perhaps equally important, so do we. In those early scenes it’s hard to tell what makes us more uncomfortable, Sabina Spielrein’s derangement or Keira Knightley’s incarnation of it. Even in tranquility Knightley’s prominent chin tends to jut forward like the submerged prow of a supertanker; as she shows us Spielrein in extremis, she becomes alarming, her arms flailing stiffly as if her muscles were trying to snap her bones, her jaw projecting in a grotesque underbite that looks like it might literally come unhinged and split her face wide open. A part of us wonders how Carl Jung kept his composure at the sight of this; another part wonders how Michael Fassbender did. By some accounts, the real Spielrein’s behavior could be even more appalling, but Knightley sometimes smudges the line between a patient acting up and an actress showing off.

Once Sabina’s personality stabilizes, the movie’s central relationship comes into focus: Jung meets Freud (an incisive Viggo Mortensen) face to face in 1907, and each man senses a kindred questing spirit in the other. Mortensen and Fassbender also seem to be kindred spirits, and it’s an education for any actor to see how they invest an almost sizzling intellectual intensity into Freud and Jung’s conversations about what Jung at first calls “psych-analysis” (Freud corrects him: “Psych-OH-analysis”). For that matter, it’s an education for any playwright to see how nimbly Hampton distills and dramatizes this give-and-take over years, and for any director to see the restrained circumspection with which Cronenberg stages it.

As the movie has it, the seed of Jung and Freud’s eventual rift is planted when Freud sends a colleague, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel, cheerfully lubricious) to Jung as a patient. Gross, a hedonist who believes in indulging every sexual whim, turns the tables on Jung and begins analyzing him. He gives Jung all the rationale he needs to follow through on the suppressed sexual tension between him and Sabina, now a thriving university student and prospective. The two become lovers in an intense cycle of punishment (from Jung) and submission (from Sabina). When Freud learns that Jung has crossed that line, it’s the beginning of the end for their respectful collegiality, though each man sees the rift in a different way from the other. And Jung’s coldly conflicted handling of the affair strains his relationships with both Sabina and Freud, in different ways.

Were Jung, Freud and Spielrein fearless measurers of the depths of the human mind, or latter-day witch doctors inflating their own preoccupations and obsessions into sweeping generalizations? A reading of A Dangerous Method could almost support either conclusion—which suggests that Hampton and Cronenberg just might be giving us something approaching what that seminal intellectual encounter was really like.