A Dangerous Method

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. CARL GUSTAV JUNG

With my new interest in psychotherapy,  you can imagine how keen I was to catch up on David Cronenberg's latest film, A Dangerous Method. I saw it last Thursday at Nottingham's excellent, independent Broadway cinema. It's not a great film, but a very good one nonetheless.

It's about the relationship between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Gustav Jung (Michael Fassbender), their friendship and subsequent falling-out. As Freud's star fades, the ambitious Jung is more than ready to carry the torch. The foci of Jung's interests are much wider than Freud's, going beyond Freud's purely sex-oriented obsessions into the realms of telepathy and the paranormal. This 'unscientific' approach irritates Freud, and is a major factor in their split. The love interest in the film centres on Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a highly intelligent but disturbed patient of Jung's. She responds well to Jung's pioneering 'talking cure', so well that he invites her to be his clinical assistant. Despite Jung's initial feelings of guilt — he has a wife and family — they become lovers. Their sexual relationship is based on sadomasochism (Spielrein associates flagellation with sexual arousal, after being regularly spanked as a child by her father). When their affair comes to an end, Spielrein turns her attention to Freud, provoking Jung's jealousy.

I do recommend going to see this film. It's beautiful to look at, full of intelligently scripted conversation, and wickedly subversive. Also it's interesting to witness the early days of psychoanalysis, a time when researchers in this field were very much misunderstood and derided by the medical profession and by society in general.     

Knowing Society, Knowing Oneself

In short, as Goethe put it, only if we can 'imagine ourselves as the author of any conceivable crime,' and mean it, can we be reasonably sure of having dropped the mask and of being on the way to becoming aware of who we are. ERICH FROMM

In an era of counselling on demand, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, e-coaching and a host of other quick-fix solutions to our mental and spiritual crises, how invigorating it is to reread Erich Fromm's The Art Of Being, as I've been doing recently. Fromm stresses the value of mindfulness and meditation as paths to self-awareness. He's not averse to psychoanalysis, but believes first and foremost in searching and honest self-analysis. And, in an age when Freudian analysis has been unfairly (in my opinion) sidelined in favour of trendier Jungian analysis, and when the theories of people like Janov and RD Laing have been neglected in favour of eminently sensible, no-nonsense regimens like CBT, it's refreshing to see Fromm taking ideas from Freud and Marx and running with them - indeed, developing and broadening them. This paragraph comes from the chapter Methods Of Self-Analysis:

What can I know of myself as long as I do not know that the self I do know is largely a synthetic product; that most people - including myself - lie without knowing it; that 'defense' means 'war' and 'duty' submission; that 'virtue' means 'obedience' and 'sin' disobedience; that the idea that parents instinctively love their children is a myth; that fame is only rarely based on admirable human qualities, and even not too often on real achievements; that history is a distorted record because it is written by the victors; that over-modesty is not necessarily the proof of a lack of vanity; that loving is the opposite of craving and greed; that everyone tries to rationalize evil intentions and actions and to make them appear noble and beneficial ones; that the pursuit of power means the persecution of truth, justice and love; that present-day industrial society is centered around the principle of selfishness, having and consuming, and not on principles on love and respect for life, as it preaches. Unless I am able to analyze the unconscious aspects of the society in which I live, I cannot know who I am, because I don't know which part of me is not me.