Eccentric's Corner: Horror Meister

I can’t worry about how people perceive what I do or what I’m interested in because it doesn’t really affect me directly. To do a story about Freud was an obvious thing because of my interest in the unconscious. You could say that Freudian concepts are everywhere in my movies. Then it’s not such a stretch to think that I might want to connect directly with Freud and the birth of psychoanalysis. You can definitely do a psychoanalytic analysis of my films, if you choose to, and it works pretty well.

And many people have done so.

Yes, they have, and I don’t mean that they try to psychoanalyze me—because anyone trying to do that through somebody’s art is doomed to failure; the relationship between an artist and his art is very complex and there are no rules; it varies incredibly from artist to artist—but the idea of people being driven by things they are not consciously aware of. The birth of psychoanalysis is an intriguing story, although it is abstract until you embody it in actual characters. The relationship between Freud and Jung in itself was interesting; much of it was carried on through letters, which is very hard to dramatize. The discovery of Sabina Spielrein and her influence on Freud and Jung triggers everything; suddenly that time becomes dramatically beautiful and seductive. Most people in the field of psychology still don’t know about Sabina Spielrein and her contribution to the thinking of these two men.

In the opening scene of the film, you turn the mental into something of the flesh, in Sabina’s physical struggle to speak. Tell me more about making the unfilmable filmable and the idiosyncratic cinematic.

For a filmmaker, and also for an actor, it is always the same—how do you embody concepts, ideas, and emotions in a way that can be filmed? You do that first of all by having actors speak dialogue and have relationships. What you are filming most if you are a filmmaker is the human body; that is your subject. For Freud, Jung, and Sabina Spielrein, their intellectual endeavors were matters of great passion. That Sabina and Jung should have a long affair makes perfect sense, that their passion should spill over into their sexual lives. There was always a passionate belief that they uncovered some incredible key to the human condition and then had to struggle to have that understanding accepted and understood.

Did you learn something about human nature that you didn’t know before, in dealing with this material?

I didn’t know a lot about Sabina or about Jung. I knew a lot about Freud. The student-enthusiast is an important part of a filmmaker. I felt I had to understand where Jung came from and where his philosophy of psychology eventually went, even beyond the scope of this movie. In reading a lot of Jung, Freud, and the letters of Sabina Spielrein, you certainly learn about the era in which they function. And in learning German, you come to understand that psychology and psychoanalysis would not have developed the way they did without the structure of the German language.

How so?

It’s certainly not my insight, but the language in which you think shapes the way you think. Although Sabina was Russian, she had to write in German in order to be considered a valid member of the psychoanalytic community. They were all beautiful writers. Part of their success was that they could communicate very subtle, very abstract, and often very controversial ideas through language and writing.

Even when Freud was disowned by the psychiatry establishment, he was very much alive in the literary establishment. One thing that struck me in the film is that Sabina changes, Jung changes, but Freud doesn’t change, notably in his view of the centrality of sexuality in causing mental illness. How significant is this depiction?

Freud was considerably older than Jung and had already gone through many changes in his own theory. Both Sabina and Jung would go through many changes in thinking just as a matter of maturing. It’s not just Freud’s views of sexuality that are the basis of the split with Jung. In reality it had much more to do with the fact that Freud feared that Jung would take psychoanalysis into mysticism and religion. In fact Jungianism is more a religion than a psychology. Not to be humorous, but sex was just the tip of the iceberg.

Speaking about sex, you show Jung beating Sabina in a sexual encounter. Was he being the good lover, satisfying her desire, while being the lousy therapist, repeating the humiliation that played a big role in creating her desire?