"A Dangerous Method" - David Cronenberg's Film on Carl Jung (Official Trailer)

Freud (front left) and Jung (front right)

Mark Vernon posted the trailer at his blog - I had no idea this was in the works. The film stars Viggo Mortensen (as Sigmund Freud), Keira Knightley (Sabina Spielrein), and Michael Fassbender (as Carl Jung). This is based on a true story recorded in the book, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein, by John Kerr. The screenplay is by Christopher Hampton, who has adapted his own stage play, The Talking Cure, for the film. It is scheduled for release in November of this year.

Here is a little background on Sabina Spielrein from Wikipedia:

Before enrolling as a student of medicine in Zürich, Spielrein was admitted in August 1904 to the Burghölzli mental hospital near Zürich, where Carl Gustav Jung worked at that time, and remained there until June 1905. While there, she established a deep emotional relationship with Jung who later was her medical dissertation advisor. The historian and psychoanalyst Peter Loewenberg argues that this was a sexual relationship, in breach of professional ethics, and that it "jeopardized his position at the Burghölzli and led to his rupture with Bleuler and his departure from the University of Zurich"^[3] Spielrein graduated in 1911, defending a dissertation about a case of schizophrenia, and was later elected a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. She continued with Jung until 1912 and later saw Sigmund Freud in Vienna.
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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 drive" and Jung's views on "transformation" (Bettelheim 1983). She may thus have inspired both men's most creative ideas.

Here is the official trailer:



I'm really looking forward to this - Cronenberg may be the perfect director for a film about the Jung/Freud relationship, with all its layers of conflict and synergy.

Tags: A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg, Film, Carl Jung, Official Trailer, Sigmund Freud, A Most Dangerous Method, John Kerr, Viggo Mortensen, Keira Knightley, Sabina Spielrein, Michael Fassbender, Mark Vernon, Psychology, history, Jung, Freud, films