But the Symposium interests us here not for its doctrinal value, but as a literary text, even as a drama. In the speeches here, you don't just hear a succession of abstractions, relics of 5th century Athenian social opinion. You also receive an impression of what Georg Lukacs calls the characters' "intellectual physiognomy": "What is decisive is that Plato reveals the thinking processes of his characters and develops their varied intellectual positions regarding the same problem--the nature of love--as the vital factor in their characters and as the most distinctive manifestation of their personalities... A character's conception of the world represents a profound personal experience and the most distinctive expression of his inner life."
A Dangerous Method takes as its subject the break (1911 and prior) between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, and the widening cracks in their theoretical approaches which would yield such vastly irreconcilable results in the following decades. The central conversation in the film, the 13-hour first meeting between these two doctors, is a prolonged debate about the preeminence of the libido in Freud's doctrine. Later crucial scenes involve technical criticism of a dissertation/case study on the ego and repression, Freud's monograph on Moses and Ikhnaton, and an early version of the death drive.
This is a movie about ideas, about method. At the same time, it aspires to be a sexual drama, a biopic, and a story of friendship and ambition. But it is rarely both of these things at once. The "Oedipal" rivalry of the younger Jung with Herr Doktor is somewhat obvious, and these scenes write themselves. But when Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) is being spanked, or indeed the entire unfolding of her affair with Jung, there is no organic relationship with her psychoanalytic ideas. The movie might be said to be about the contours of her desire, but when she outlines her contributions to Freud, instead of thinking, "Of course YOU would think that!" instead I was confused and bored.
The filmmakers do obliquely demonstrate one theoretical point very nicely: Jung's conception of the libido theory, of "sex" as a positive force, is indeed vulgar and bourgeois--the hedonism of a frat boy. This we see only in his actions. You might say that Freud and Jung's supposed debate about the *centrality* of sex is really a debate about the meaning and limits of the word "sex." Neither of them see this, but we do. The film is also very smart about the Jewish question in pre-war German speaking countries, in relation to psychoanalysis.
What it means to have *these* ideas, and not other ones, is so central to the experience of being a person, and desire is so tangled up in metaphysics already (our "type" is an eminently Aristotelian conception), that the film suffers immensely by leaving these levels uncoordinated. Why is Jung, this prim, austere hypocrite, drawn to the theory of the unconscious in the first place? It's not clear. Why does he stray into mystical territories of study? This has nothing to do with the film's central love story. When Jung laments that psychoanalysis can only show the patient his disease, "squatting there like a toad," this is a powerful image--but it isn't coming from Jung-as-character. It is coming from some external biographical fact.
One of my brilliant readers argues that Jung's ideas about mysticism are a reflection of his refusal to pursue a life with Sabina; they are a kind of alternate fulfillment of what he cannot face and has rejected in favor of the comfortable sterility of his domestic establishment. I am unconvinced. The "person Jung could have been," in his sexual position vis-a-vis Sabina, is hardly a "mystical escape" or even an alternative. In his passionate affair, he is a brutal disciplinarian, the apotheosis of his proto-nazi "Aryan" Protestant restraint... and so not some departure or path not taken.
The way I read the "squatting there like a toad" line is that this really IS what psychoanalysis does. Jung's definition is right! The mistake is, on top of that, to then want to "give meaning" to the bare coarseness of existence. It follows, then, that it is his AFFAIR WITH SABINA that is the symptom, the "toad," the satisfaction and fantasy-formation that makes his bourgeois life bearable.
Let me recommend two better movies about psychoanalysis. The first is John Huston's Freud, with Montgomery Clift, and an early scenario written by J-P Sartre, who knew a thing or two about coordinating the dead facts of biography and oeuvre with the desires at the heart of a "project" (cf. his interminable biography of Flaubert). The second is Cronenberg's own The Brood, which treats a charismatic psychotherapists' own "dangerous method" of inducing sores and mysterious "acting-out" of the violent revenge fantasies of his patients. Without giving anything away, the ugliness of desire here culminates in the unchecked elaborating of symptoms, truly building out into the dark.
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