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Let me say at the outset that I may be the wrong person to review A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg's (Thomas, 2011) painstakingly researched period piece on the relationship between Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. Despite having been trained at an institute where statues of Freud adorned the library, I lacked the requisite fascination with the lives and personalities of the characters who comprised this “intellectual ménage a trois” (Cronenberg, cited in O'Hehir, 2011) and was more concerned with the truth value of their theories. The obligatory copy of the three-volume biography of The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (Jones, 1953) remained unopened on my bookshelf; instead, I avidly read The White Hotel (Thomas, 1982), a fictional account that similarly relied on the Freud- Jung letters as a source.
My first reaction to A Dangerous Method focused on the inadequacy of its abridged theoretical discussions. For example, Jung's theory of anima-animus is inserted into a scene where Jung chastises Spielrein for taking the lead in their sexual seduction. She asks, “Don't you think there's something male in every woman, or something female in every man, or should be?” and he replies, “I expect you're right, yes!” Freud's complex ideas are given similar short shrift and the examples of dream interpretation are closer to a parlor game than the careful examinations described in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900). Yet no similar objections arose when watching comparable works focused on historical personalities and their ideas in any other field, for example, Michael Fraynes's Copenhagen, which dealt with the relationship between Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Why then, did I approach the movie with such a critical eye? After all, it was a film, not an article in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Robert Ray (1985) noted that a popular film reflects the unconscious fantasies of its culture. It stands to reason that the reactions to a popular film about