You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
With so few films that deal with significant themes in the history of our discipline, the occasion of David Cronenberg's (2011) A Dangerous Method presents innumerable interpretive possibilities to both the psychoanalyst and historian. It is somewhat unique to have an historical work become a stage play before becoming a film. But that is what happened when Christopher Hampton transformed John Kerr's (1995) A Most Dangerous Method into a stage play (The Talking Cure) in 2002 - and finally into a screenplay. In my view this helps us understand why the film may strike some as a hybrid, not unlike psychoanalysis itself. While Hampton and Cronenberg have crafted an admirable film, it falls between two stools, at once a historical documentary and, at another level, a drama about ill-fated love, both of the heart and of the mind. A Dangerous Method is more like a ‘docu-drama,’ itself a chemical compound that is to the liking of some, but not to all. Since I enjoyed the concoction, I break up the narrative of the film into two acts, faithful to Hampton's dramatic structure as embedded in the film. I then present a psychoanalytic critique in terms of the Freud/Jung/Spielrein triangle as a cinematic portal into the perennial problem of countertransference in its historical context.
First, the bones and knuckles of the story.
The carriage that raced down a road towards the Burghölzli Hospital and carried 19 year-old Sabina Spielrein screaming and gesticulating wildly was met by 29 year-old Carl Jung. The date (17 August 1904) is one that marked the beginning of Spielrein's talking cure with Dr. Jung, who had recently