Review

David Cronenberg's film, A Dangerous Method, centres on the birth of psychoanalysis, the complex and turbulent relationship between Freud and Jung, and the significance of two of Jung's early analysands, Sabina Spielrein and Otto Gross. Cronenberg's colleague and co-worker in the creation of this film is Christopher Hampton, a British playwright and screenwriter whose other works include films from a similar historic period:

• Total Eclipse is a film about the torrid and often violent relationship between the 19^th century poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.

• Carrington follows the affair between the writer Lytton Strachey and the artist Dora Carrington.

• Mary Reilly is a remake of the classic horror story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

As a foundation for this latest film script, Hampton drew on an earlier work, Sabina, which focused on the life of Spielrein and her death at the hands of the Nazis. There was a telling comment in an interview with Moviescope Magazine where Hampton acknowledged that of all the characters involved, he was ‘least sympathetic’ to Jung. Although he claims to have become more acquainted with Jung and shifted his sympathies, in order to do the film script for Sabina, the content of A Dangerous Method and the woodenness of the portrayal of Jung, suggests Hampton (2012) may have retained some of his original prejudice. The screenplay for A Dangerous Method was also based on John Kerr's National Theatre play, The Talking Cure.

David Cronenberg is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as ‘the body-horror or venereal-horror genre’ (Grant 2000, p. 37). In this type of horror-fiction the horror is principally derived from the graphic destruction or degeneration of the body (Grant 2000, p. 41). Such works may deal with disease, decay, parasitism, mutilation, mutation, unnatural movements, or the use of human body parts to create ‘monsters’. This style of film-making explores people's fear of bodily transmutation and infection. In Cron