Review A Dangerous Method [2011] | poetslandscape

IMDb listing -

http://www.Imdb.Com/identify/tt1571222/

Roger Ebert's evaluate -

http://rogerebert.Suntimes.Com/apps/p.C..Dll/article?AID=/20111214/REVIEWS/111219993

I determined A Dangerous Method (directed by David Cronenberg, screenplay by using way of Christopher Hampton primarily based completely on the e-book A Most Dangerous Method via John Kerr and the play The Talking Cure via Christopher Hampton), a possibly wealthy bio-p.C and early twentieth century period piece to be remarkably disappointing.

I determined it to be so in specific element due to the reality I had study definitely quite appreciably from their works which might locate software to my subject.

Of Sigmund Freud, I simply have study Totem and Taboo [1913], Civilization and its Discontents [1930], and Moses and Monotheism [1939].

Of Carl Jung I have read various essays (in Italian translation) available through the Bollati Boringhieri series of translated essays/monographs available in Italy while did my seminary studies there in the 1990s.  I had already known of Carl Jung from my novitiate in the United States and I had found the Bollati Boringhieri series a joy to read because one could purchase Carl Jung's essays essentially a la carte.  Among those that I read at the time were: La Psicolologia del Sogno (The Psychology of Dreams), Risposta a Giobbe (Response to Job), La Vita Simbolica (The Symbolic Life), Gli Archetypi dell'Inconscio Collettivo (The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious).  Additionally, during my last year in the seminary in Rome, I read in English translation C.J. Jung's famous essay A Psychological Approach to the Doctrine of the Trinity [1936] published in C.J. Jung, Collected Works, Vol 11, Psychology and Religion - East and West [1970]).

I had also known of the famous break between Sigmund Freud and the younger Carl Jung.  So I had come to this movie with rather high hopes that the film would help explain the cause of the break, which I always assumed had been driven largely (though not entirely) by egos.  But I left the film disappointed.

I did examine a range of of factors about the private existence of Carl Jung (executed right right here with the aid of manner of Michael Fassbender), substantially that he had a as an alternative wealthy spouse Emma (played via Sarah Gadon) and he did discover himself with several mistresses at some point of his lifestyles together with Sabina Spielrein (accomplished here by manner of Keira Knightly) who turned into first his affected man or woman, then his student and finally a psychologist in her personal right.

I also left the film being able to appreciate a little better the truly remarkable time in which Freud and Jung had lived.  At one point, Freud (played in the movie by Viggo Mortensen) compared his and Jung's burgeoning field of psychology to the discovery of a New Continent, saying:

"Columbus did not know where he arrived when he reached the New World.  No one did for another 100 years.  We do not know as yet where we've actually arrived but having discovered this new continent [of the subconscious] I'm certainly going to explore it."

To which Jung is presented as adding: "I'd rather compare you to Galileo, who was being condemned by his enemies even as they refused to look into the looking glass of the telescope that he invented [with which he made the observations on which he based his theories]."

But alas, the two came to part ways. Freud wished to continue to study/interpret nearly all psychological phenenomena "scientifically" through application of his concept of the libido (sex drive). Carl Jung did not wish to be so constrained.  And just as the Marxists (and more recently our era's Market Capitalists) had drifted into dogmatism with regard to economic theory, so did eventually both Freud and Jung with regards to psychology.  [Still, if one understands that the "scientific" approaches taken with regards to economics or psychology are necessarily broad-brush in nature, all these approaches have definite value, albeit with limits].

Be all this as it may, I've told a number of people after seeing this film that I would have happily sat through if it was 3 hours long especially if it got into the genesis of some of Freud's and Jung's ideas.  Instead, film wasn't even 2 hours long (coming in at 1:39).  So came across to me as a very thin soup: One got only a few gossipy tidbits about the two men, Freud and Jung (and about the two women in Jung's life at the time).  However, we really could have gotten so much more.

One thinks simply of the movie Shadowlands [1993] about a rather complicated, interesting and (in his own words) "surprising" period in the life of philosopher/theologian C.S. Lewis (a contemporary of both Freud and Jung) and one wants to weep:  Surely one could have done much more in making a film about Freud and Jung (and the significant women around them) than was done here.

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