This is not a film to be digested in a single viewing. It is a dense movie of ideas, for one thing, but it also struck me as a visually sophisticated film that was communicating a lot on a nonverbal level.
It’s the story of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s relationship with one of his patients, Sabina Spielrein (who herself became a psychoanalyst in real life), and with his mentor, Sigmund Freud. For the most part the ideas discussed in the film are concerned with Freudian theory and psychoanalysis, although there’s a bit of discussion of Jung’s more mystical theories as well. The ideas circle around binary pairings of sane and insane, freedom and repression, destruction and creation, sex and death, self-knowledge and transcendence, but part of the complexity of the story is that it also depicts other binaries or tensions, as between upper and middle class, Aryan and Jew, male and female, German and Russian. All three of the main characters talk explicitly about how the collisions of opposites create energy and life, and the movie appears to embody this notion. What’s not clear to me on a first viewing is how ironic the perspective is.
For example, one of the tensions explored is racial, with the Aryan Jung dismissing the importance of Sabina’s Jewishness while the Jewish Freud insists that it will always be a divide. Hovering over this discussion (the film is set in the first two decades of the twentieth century) is the looming catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust, which is only alluded to tangentially at the very end. Yet another dimension of this racial tension, however, is the way that Jung is portrayed as sexually repressed, while Sabina is the thrilling, neurotic sexual temptress. This is one of the oldest cliches in the anti-Semitic book, as Cronenberg is no doubt well aware, but he plays it completely straight-faced. A similar tension hovers over the discussion of Wagner — a notorious anti-Semite — whose operas both Sabina and Jung adore.
For me, Wagner raises yet another association that seems to thread its way through the discussion uncommented upon. Sabina and Jung discuss the Siegfried myth directly, but at the end of the film Jung tells her, “The wounded doctor heals best.” This to me suggests the Amfortas Wound, which is part of the Parsifal myth, which of course Wagner also treated operatically. Google tells me the quote is actually from Seneca, but the association is still there. My thought was that this weirdly turned Sabina into Parsifal, but I’m not sure. Google also tells me that Jung explicitly wrote about the Amfortas wound and felt he had suffered such a wound to his psyche in the rupture with Freud, which actually happened long after he took Sabina into his care.
But this is one of the ways the movie seems to work, and it probably helps to have some basic knowledge about the era and particularly the intellectual history of the era. There was much I couldn’t parse, much I was unsure of. Again, how ironic is the perspective? How seriously are we supposed to take these ideas? Ultimately Freud breaks off with Jung because he feels that Jung’s dabbling in mysticism will cast a pall on psychoanalysis. “We must remain solidly in the arena of science,” he says, or something to that effect. To me, that’s hilariously ironic, because Freudian theory isn’t itself scientific. It’s not testable in an experimental fashion, and it’s not falsifiable. It’s essentially a literary or mythological approach to understanding the human psyche. Jung may replace Freud’s Oedipus Complex with the Amfortas Wound, but these are both drawn from mythology. Neither has anything to do with science.
So is this movie a great big joke, on that level? Another tension it raises is the way that Sabina becomes a token in the conflict between Jung and Freud — two great men battling each other through a woman whose mental stability depends on their treatment. The film clearly invites us to judge both Freud and Jung as driven by their insecurities and need to be authority figures. It’s less clear to me whether we are to view their treatment of Sabina as abusive. It’s not hard to see her as a woman who trades the abuse of her father for the abuse of these father figures. Where is the healing?
And perhaps that’s the great question A Dangerous Method raises. Freud wants to help his patients understand themselves. Jung wants to help his patients become their best selves. Is either goal actually possible? We are also invited to wonder whether any of these characters is actually sane — which I suppose is another way of saying it asks us to wonder what sanity is. All of them are damaged goods, that’s for sure. “You helped me understand who I really am,” Jung tells Sabina, and yet I wasn’t any clearer about who he really was at the end of the movie than I was at the beginning. So much for liberating the libido.
It’s a movie full of intellectual puzzles, I suppose. Sabina Spielrein was a real person, and a very accomplished psychoanalyst in her own right, yet I am fascinated by the implications of her last name. My memory from two years of German was that “spiel rein” could be translated “play herein”. Google Translate suggests “pure play”. One implies that Sabina is a plaything for men (play inside her), and the other implies the freedom and release of play. Another tension, even if it’s only in my own head. Perhaps that’s what this play of ideas and conflicts is meant to help us explore.
