Viggo Mortensen & Michael Fassbender as Freud & Jung

Christopher Hampton won an Oscar for the screenplay for Dangerous Liasons and was nominated for his adaptation of Atonement. A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg’s film version of Hampton’s stage play The Talking Cure takes place in the first decade of the 20th Century. The Playlist has found first-look photos from the set of A Dangerous Method featuring Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud and Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung, and helpfully assembles a comparison of the historical figures side by side with their cinematic counterparts (after the cut).

Overshadowed by portents of the coming wars, Zurich and Vienna are the setting for this tale of emotional vicissitude and intellectual debate. The Talking Cure is an intimate picture of the birth of psychoanalysis and of two intense and inextricably interwoven relationships. Carl Jung uses Sigmund Freud’s “talking cure” on Sabina, a young Russian hysteric with whom he will fall in love. Impressed with Jung’s results, Freud anoints him his successor, but when Jung develops his own theories they part ways. Sensitive and intelligent, The Talking Cure illuminates the origins of one of the twentieth century’s most influential schools of thought.

That synopsis of the play leaves out the emphasis on sexual tension between Jung and Sabina (played by Keira Knightley). But Knightley’s role is more than a simple love-interest subplot. Jung’s conflicted feelings about becoming romantically involved with a patient — and Freud’s disapproval — have basis in historical events, and it’s no surprise Christopher Hampton would latch onto the affair as a fascinating hook.

Sabina Spielrein was a real person, an actual patient under Jung’s care, and later became one of the first female psychoanalysts with an important career in her own right. After her therapy, she continued her relationship with Jung as a student, and served as his assistant for many years. Spielrein was quite a beauty, and she’s credited with significant contributions to psychoanalytic thought involving the connection between Eros and Tanatos, two basic human drives thought to be opposing forces — one yearning to propagate life and the other compelled to destroy it. Spielrein eventually returned to Russia and it’s believed she was killed by the Nazi SS in 1942.

While Spielrein is not often given more than a footnote in the history of the development of psychoanalysis, her conception of the sexual drive as containing both an instinct of destruction and an instinct of transformation, presented to the Society in 1912, in fact anticipates both Freud’s “death wish” and Jung’s views on “transformation” (Bettelheim 1983). She may thus have inspired both men’s most creative ideas.

Obviously the thrust of this post today focuses on Mortensen and Fassbender, but there’s every reason to expect an important performance from Knightley as well.