Portrait of the Analyst as a Jung Man

Director David Cronenberg's new movie A Dangerous Method is, primarily, a portrait of the brilliant Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung. We first meet Jung in 1904, in the early years of his career as attending psychoanalyst at Burgholzli Hospital in Zurich. A severely troubled young woman is dragged in screaming. She is 18 year-old Sabina Spielrein, whose parents have sent her more than a thousand miles from her home in Russia for treatment at Eugen Bleuler's famous hospital.
Jung becomes Sabina's psychoanalyst and uses Sigmund Freud's new "talking cure" with her. Interestingly, the analysis takes place with Sabina not reclining on a couch but sitting in a chair with Jung behind her.

Sabina recovers her sanity astoundingly quickly under Jung's care. After two years, Jung and Bleuler help Sabina enroll in medical school at the University of Zurich. She completes her degree and eventually becomes one of the first women psychoanalysts, making important original contributions to the field. Sabina was in such terrible shape at the beginning of her treatment--her diagnosis was severe hysteria with psychotic features--that we are awed by Jung's accomplishment in curing her.

So far, Jung is portrayed as a respectable Swiss physician, husband, and father. His wife Emma is beautiful and devoted. She is also very rich, as Jung insensitively brags to Freud when the two later meet and become close friends. Jung is a fine analyst, but personally he has the warmth of a glacial lake.

When Sabina invites Jung to have an affair, his shadow side emerges. Jung the brilliant psychoanalyst cured Sabina, but Jung the man cannot resist her offer. Betraying the doctor-patient relationship, he begins a torrid affair with Sabina. The love scenes are graphic and violent--much of what we would expect from Cronenberg, who sought, in A Dangerous Method, to make "an elegant film that trades on emotional horror."

The film is so beautifully and intelligently made that we are carried along with it. We are shocked by the violence but engaged with the story. We learn to accept that while Jung the psychoanalyst is a brilliant and skillful doctor, Jung the man is deeply damaged and not very self-aware. He shows himself capable of betraying anyone who gets close to him. In one scene, Jung's wife gives him an exquisite sailboat. Jung quickly turns his wife's love gift into a love nest for himself and Sabina.

At the historic meeting of Jung and Freud in Vienna in 1907, the warm and emotionally vulnerable Freud stands in sharp contrast to Jung. The remarkable scene in which Freud analyzes his younger colleague's dream of a runway horse fits seamlessly into the narrative. It was this form of dream interpretation--by analyzing symbols to access the unconscious mind--that William James called "a most dangerous method." Freud's analogical way of thinking was a radical departure from the "scientific" cause and effect reasoning that dominated the early twentieth century scientific community. James believed that analogical thinking was a throwback to superstition and was therefore dangerous.

Cronenberg's film highlights another way in which Freud's talking cure was dangerous. In the hands of a self-aware and ethical therapist, psychoanalysis is a powerful tool for healing human suffering. Like all powerful tools, however, in the hands of a doctor who puts his own desires before the well-being of his patient, it can be exceedingly dangerous. Ultimately, Sabina recovers from the affair and Jung's betrayal, and they become friends and colleagues. There is even a sense in which the affair has liberated Sabina and aided in her healing. In any case, by the end of the film Sabina has forgiven Jung, even if we have not.

Is Jung's indiscretion historical fact? It seems that it is. John Kerr, the author of the nonfiction book, A Most Dangerous Method, on which the film is based, was able to read authentic journals and letters by Sabina Speilrein, along with Jung's and Freud's responses to her. Kerr learned from these original documents that Jung and Sabina had been lovers after she left Burgholzli Hospital. Christopher Hampton, who wrote the screenplay of the film, also read Jung's original notes on Sabina's treatment at the small museum now at Burgholzli.

Like any historical narrative, A Dangerous Method is a subjective interpretation of events and of characters. For the therapist interested in the history of our field, it is a fascinating account of the early days of psychoanalysis. Freud and Jung are monumental figures in the history of psychotherapy. Their "talking cure" and analogical method were rejected over and over by their more materialist contemporaries as throwbacks to superstition. Then, as now, many doctors searched for physical causes of mental conditions yielding the sort of brain mythology that we have in our own time. Yet Freud and Jung never lost faith in their method of treatment because they had first hand evidence that it cured their patients. This spurred them to persist in the face of tremendous obstacles, both from external attacks and internal dissent. The film focuses on their human foibles; but it also illuminates the courageous struggles and intellectual power of these two men, which eventually made psychoanalysis the dominant method of psychotherapy in the Western world.